This morning, I began my day by making a CAD model of a hand for Shihao’s robot. The new hand I made was in a box shape because Shihao wanted it to be a plane to contact the wall with so it has more stability. The original hand was shaped like a human hand and had only one point of contact on the wall so it was not very stable. The CAD model itself was fairly easy to make because Shihao gave me the files with the piece I needed to modify into the rectangular hand. There was one problem, there were 200 different templates for pieces, and all the files were in Chinese. This meant I had to open every file to find the one I wanted. Of course the one I wanted was at the end so I spent a solid 30 minutes opening and converting files from a Solidworks file to a Fusion 360 file to see if it was the piece I needed. After I finished the CAD model, Shihao sent it to the Duke innovation lab to be 3D printed.
The second thing I worked on was rebuilding the old robot for Shihao. I had to take it all apart, remove all the extra piece and electronics he added, and then reassemble it. This was a long and kind of boring task (I can see why he had me do it), but it payed off in the end. When I finished it, Shihao connected it to his phone and let me play around with the motions it can do. It can dance, do push ups and sit ups, punch, kick, and even dive as if to be a goalie in a soccer game. All in all, it was another fun day working in the Duke robotics lab.
