Quote of the Day

"Oh, good baby, learning to moderate your applied forces in the Z direction!"

- Yeah, that'd be me.

"Compliance control" is a make-believe spring-mass-damper system that's superimposed on the robot's joints to make them act springy. You need a force sensor, too, usually at the robot wrist. When the sensor goes off, the commands to the robot are modified based on the sensed force. This prevents a very strong robot from smashing through a more delicate object that it would like to touch.

The Spud is newly fascinated with his stacking cups. We stack them for him, and he likes to touch them just a little so that the stack wobbles but doesn't fall down. He is, essentially, tuning his own compliance controller.

Since everybody else is doing it...

I must confess that I've put back on almost all the weight that came off while I was breastfeeding. (Should that be "assisted breastfeeding"? Whatever.) And the strange sciatica-like sensations that prompted me to start walking, back in 2001, are back, because I do nothing but sit on my butt all day now. There is no time for the gym with the baby around.

I've brought a rubber mat in to work; with some hand weights and some standard calisthenics, I can at least get some strength training in. I also ought to start emerging from this windowless warehouse during the day and walking for a bit; that would help with the legs.