A robot for automating 3D printers

Finally got the AprilTag detector to work. Now I just need to place these around the robot environment.

Alot of pain today,. Ended up restarted from scratching by rebuilding librealsense from source. For some reason that resolved the compiling issues.

I decided to switch from using QR codes to April Tags for the pose localization. This seems to be the Industry standard. I am currently tinkering with ArUco for image processing.

Did a great job of explaining the basics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8ZSzofAKTk

Finally got the entire joystick controller mapped correctly. I did a quick demo of the robot driving around.

We hardcoded a quick demo of the robot driving to the printer and removing the build plate. Next step is to add computer vision so that the robot can do this autonomously.

Spent the last few weeks configuring the drive system. Alot of weird things happening. But finally the joystick was mapped to the wheel.

We have finished wiring all components of the robot (end effector, winch, etc). We made a quick demo video of how the robot works. Next step is to focus on the drive system.

We have mounted the electromagnets on the robot's end effector. We have also added a winch to raise and lower the end effector. The next step is to test lifting the build plate.

We added an insulator between the build plate and printer. This reduces the required lifting force.

We have purchased electromagnets to eject the steel build plate on our 3D printer. We have decided to exclusively use Prusa printers for testing as these are the 3D printers used by our school.

Unfortunately, these magnets are not strong enough to pick up the build plate. We will need to think of a way to reduce the required lifting force.