By: Victoria Gottardi, Yifan Xu, and Firaas Khan

What are We Investigating? 

For Devs 2, we wanted to experiment with setting up some objects of different heights on the table, and try to discover how the robot arm could be capable of filming these objects to our precise measurements. We also wanted to experiment with how the gripper moves while holding the camera. For project one, we are planning on creating an advertisement, so we must be very strategic with our shots. We want to make sure the robot gives us the most affordances when creating really clean and usable shots. The positioning and movement of the phone and gripper will be crucial to getting what we’ll need.

The Process

Here is the link to the first attempt

Here is the link to the second attempt

Code

Here is the link to attempt one’s code

Here is the link to attempt two’s code

What We Learned

For this experiment, our main takeaway was that the gripper does not spin 360 degrees, so in order to move it in the correct position, you must make sure it is not fully turned one way to the max. We also learned that spinning the gripper too much can actually take away from the shot and potentially be visually nauseating to the viewer. In these experiments, we also played with the time of each waypoint, we discovered that the best length of time was 3-4 seconds and it appears that this amount of time could capture our desired items effectively. However, we think the length of time of each waypoint might also depend on what we are planning to show with the shot, and how we want the viewer to view and understand the shot.