I arrived at Bilkent University this week, and immediately jumped in to course creation with Onur Ozcan. We filed the paperwork to create Flexible Robotics, a new course in the Bilkent Mechanical Engineering Department that will be thematically linked to my foldable robotics course back at ASU, with a few potential changes:

• Targeted to upper-level undergrad
• Focusing on using off the shelf simulators instead of pynamics
• Including more pre-defined mechanisms
• Include a midterm and final

I have been working with the equality/weld form of constraints and finally got things working between two bodies using the relpose and anchor tags correctly defined. I had to point the distal links down to be able to define a workable quaternion that would solve correctly.

Though you have to use the position in XML, you can use the initial configuration at t=0 to assist the solver in starting from a more valid configuration.

I also am working on getting my visa and work exemption applications ready…