Today was a very successful day. I was able to get the PS2 controller to hook up to the robot, and control the robot with it. The robot can to a range of motions from walking to boxing to doing pushups to dancing. It is actually quite funny to watch the robot do some of these actions. Something I found interesting was the three different robots I have worked on were all from China and could all play soccer and box. This makes me wonder if like robosoccer and roboboxing is a thing in China; It would be kind of funny to watch. I also had to do some coding today as Shihao wanted me to customize one of the buttons. He wanted to be able to press the “start” button and have the robot go back to its original starting position (arms stretched out horizontal to the ground while standing straight up). To do this, I had to take some existing code and modify it. Despite having limited programming knowledge, I was also successful with this task.
Today was also a very tense time in the lab because it was the monthly meeting with the professor. Every PhD student, including Shihao, had to meet with the professor to give him an update on their work. No one liked this meeting though because it is where they all get told their work is bad and they need to do more.