Where I am so far
As of 9/3/2017, the MARCO experimental platform is complete, take a look at the "MARCO construction" page for details. This device is an immobile, undockable rig made just to run the MARCO software and acquire a polo surface's attitude. If this project progresses incredibly quickly, I may have time to build some sort of docking mechanism and vehicle around it, though as great as that would be it's highly unlikely. The primary purpose of this project is to explore the core functionality of the system, namely its ability to determine target attitude.
Also, I have successfully completed the app that constructs a .polo file. The app is written in Matlab, as it performs some fairly complex trigonometry and calculus. The app is somewhat limited: it only allows the construction of a square target surface, using exactly four equally-sized targets, and each of those targets is placed in the corners of the surface. Trust me, the math for this case was difficult enough; if I were to try to generalize the process any more, I would find myself still working on polo files in December.
Additionally, I have constructed and printed the first ever polo target surface using GIMP. I thought about writing a script to ingest the polo file and automatically construct the surface in GIMP, but decided against it for now. I have the target surface I need, I probably won't need another for a while, and it is not particularly difficult or time-consuming to draw up a new one manually.
Moving forward, I am returning to work on the experimental setup this week. So far I put it physically together and wrote a few bash scripts to get the system up and running, but I had to stop when I got to the part of MARCO that ingests a polo file, realizing that I did not yet have a polo file to ingest.
Also, I have successfully completed the app that constructs a .polo file. The app is written in Matlab, as it performs some fairly complex trigonometry and calculus. The app is somewhat limited: it only allows the construction of a square target surface, using exactly four equally-sized targets, and each of those targets is placed in the corners of the surface. Trust me, the math for this case was difficult enough; if I were to try to generalize the process any more, I would find myself still working on polo files in December.
Additionally, I have constructed and printed the first ever polo target surface using GIMP. I thought about writing a script to ingest the polo file and automatically construct the surface in GIMP, but decided against it for now. I have the target surface I need, I probably won't need another for a while, and it is not particularly difficult or time-consuming to draw up a new one manually.
Moving forward, I am returning to work on the experimental setup this week. So far I put it physically together and wrote a few bash scripts to get the system up and running, but I had to stop when I got to the part of MARCO that ingests a polo file, realizing that I did not yet have a polo file to ingest.
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