Week 1

Portfolio Website with Jekyll and Drafts for The Final Project

This week my main goals were to start developing my projects showcase website and to plan the ways my final project can spread out.

  1. Website

    I surely don’t want to write pure html, css and js, so I’ve decided to use a static site generator Jekyll. After some time of searching for a starting theme I’ve chosen minimal-mistakes-theme by Micheal Rose. Primarily because it’s a very minimalistic theme that I will be able to customize more later to make a much better site. Right now I can already post .md files as new pages and navigate to them with the sidebar. Maybe next weekend I will sit down to make it better.

  2. Final Project

    Having no prior experience with making things it was really hard to narrow down at least the skale of the project, seeing as in previous runs of the subject, people settled on something quite small and simple and my ideas being very big and probably unrealistic, I think I’ve managed to come up with something possible.

    My main inspiration was that machine that surgeons used to make very precise operations, that became famous after “surgery on a grape” video and subsequent memes. The machine allows to transfer makro movements of the surgeons hands into micro movements of 3 probes. My idea is to simplify that machine and use it in more often-occuring places. Idea is to make an interface that will be able to transfer human arms movements into a robotic arm movements, everything digitally and wirelessly.

    The final goal is to be able to attach 2 small arms to a drone and connect them to some person’s amrs. Then (if we solve the problem of attaching the drone to some surface) it would be possible to fix some complicated problems in the not-human-accessible places. For example in some ventilation shaft there is access to some important wires, if a person could get there it would be easy to fix them with hands (in gloves), but if a person can’t get there surely a drone can get there, and again it could a fast, cheap fix for the problem.

    Basically the main benefit of this idea is that we don’t need a very advance robotic intelligence and we can use what we already have - human intelligence. So, given that, the main goals of the interface are: ease of learning it and low price.

    The plan is to start from arm “glove” to read all the movements. If we will do that in time then we can repurpose designes from the internet to make a hand glove for the project. And after all of that we can create a robotic arm that will replicate all the movements of the “glove”.