Golden Robot

"If all you have is a robot, everything looks like a nail." -Abraham Maslow

Day 1

This was more of a trial and error day (mostly error) than a production day. 

In the beginning there was a lot of user error in generating the code. Once a working code was generated,  we still found some code problems. Since the simulator does not show the height of the pin, we did not set the arm high enough when moving with a pin over the surface. This caused some held nails to clash against the nails already set down. There were some parts of the surface that were too thin for a nail to stay embedded. In the higher parts of the surface, there was a problem with the nail being too short which caused a (slow) collision with the (thankfully) foam surface. We learned a valuable lesson in not looking away, even for a second, while operating robots.

The next issue was a combination of the gripper foam attachment and the choice of the nail. Since the nail head was so small (finishing nail), it didn't have enough friction and kept slipping up the fingers of the gripper until it hit the back of the attachment. Once it did that, it would actually begin to penetrate the surface. This caused really big accuracy variations and overall sloppiness. We tried replacing the foam with a few other materials. Denser foam (no real difference), foam core (slightly better) and white eraser (much better until the nail tore into it).

At the end of the day, we went home defeated and hungry but with a battle plan.

Day 2

We came in with plenty of coffee and determination to defeat this robit! First, we replaced the finishing nails with box nails, so the wider head would get more embedded into the foam. Then, instead of having a single material for the finger bed, we put in bass wood to act as a stopper and foam core for gripping purposes. 

The thin patch of the surface couldn't really be solved but for the high parts, we stopped the arm before it got too close to the surface and then jogged it to make it work like a super expensive mallet.

Once all these were set up, it was just a matter of letting things run their course. We ended up finishing the whole exercise in under 2 hours (not counting Day 1)!