This week we started to build a prototype of our gripping system and looked for alternatives to ROS. Since our robot still can’t drive with ROS, we decided to look for alternatives. At the moment we plan to move the robot with Phython on the Rasperry Pi and control the hardware with a serial connection to Arduinos, since not all Arduino libraries are available for the Rasperry Pi. On the hardware side, we started building our grapper this week, which should bring the plants into shape. This is now servo driven and can be controlled by an Arduino. At the moment we have a relatively small opening angle, which we will revise. Our first attempts with the grapper can be seen in the video. Our plan for next week is to create a base for our code on the Rasperry Pi and mount the gripping system on a test driving base to test the system in motion.
(author: Christoph)