A blog about mechatronics

We have a project course at our  master program System, Control and Mechatronics, were we could apply to one of around 30 projects available. I was really happy that I got my first choice, which is a project carried out as a joint effort between SSRS (Swedish Sea Rescue Society) and Chalmers. The goal is to develop  autonomous or/and semi-autonomous vehicles that can help out in rescue missions. The current vehicle, a large water scooter named Rescue Runner, is able to follow a larger leader boat. However, the people involved want some better tracking capabilities and stability of the control system. We are currently a team of three persons hoping to achieve this. Stay tuned, more information will be posted when we finish. Or well, not if we sink though. Then I'll try to cover it up, and hope for dedicated readers to spam me with comments ;) Here you can read some in Swedish about the project: http://www.chalmers.se/sv/nyheter/Sidor/Autonomous-Rescue-Runner.aspx

This summer I worked at a project for RUAG Space in Sweden where we constructed a robot arm from scratch more or less. First we were in a recruitment competition for a week where we proposed a draft solution and won. We were all master students from Chalmers University of Gothenburg. Then RUAG decided they wanted the arm, and launched it as a summer job. We built it from scratch in around 16 workdays. Everything from hardware design, to software development to laser-cutting of metal parts and all in between those was done.  We got to show it at a major event in Sweden called Almedalsveckan where our foreign minister Margot Wallström and first Swedish astronaut Christer Fuglesang took a good look at it. Here is a video describing it all: I took care of modeling, simulation, some of the electronics construction and most of the low-level programming in this project. Previous experience came in handy and I think we managed to avoid many time consuming traps.  Funny t...