This week the Addtronics team has been hard at work with prototype building and prototype testing. Continuing from our milestones and goals from the previous week, we’ve been able to incorporate the majority of our prototype plan to increase time for testing and modifications. We first reduced the arm from 6 degrees of freedom to 4 degrees of freedom by locking two of the motors in place and removing their controllers. Upon doing this we were then able to condense the electrical components. The electrical components were then organized and mounted into the new plastic electric box prototype to be mounted onto the interface. The wires were further organized and protected using nylon conduits to avoid tangling while the robot was operated. Additionally, this week we constructed the wooden interface prototype and printed the picatinny rails for mounting the interface onto the quadruped. After the interface was mounted we were able to successfully mount the arm and electrical box into the interface.

This completes the majority of the components we plan to present for our prototype day demonstration! We are continuing working on controlling the arm using the Raspberry Pi and adding that to the electrical box. Once the Raspberry Pi has been fully integrated, we will be able to begin testing lifting the mock transformer pad lid and making any necessary modifications. In the meantime, we have begun some initial testing to observe the weight the quadruped can hold while staying stable (seen in the video below). The weight was mounted in a cantilevered fashion to simulate the moment created by the arm extension when lifting the lid in the field.