Wow, thats awsome, I would love to build one of those. Could I get the so called white paper?
Thanks
We did a similar thing called “the Backpack” a few years ago; we too were going to do that kind of arm control, but we decided not to later. Yours looks great!
In watching the championships…and the speeches/introductions… There was this interesting human arm control that Dean and his team made for DARPA. 14 degress of freedom…if I remember correctly…
We takked a lot about whether having on before the match but not plugged in would be acceptable and decisded it wouldn’t. It’s great to hear that we can wear it and then plug it in after auton.
830 had a similar arm control system, we had a small miniature arm that controlled our main arm but we didn’t get it working till waterloo. but it got us the xerox creativity award at waterloo 
We can also relate:
Good times back in 2004!
does this actually move to the exact position the arm is in? i believe the team is 910, they have a mini one, but it doesnt just travel to where the mini arm is, instead, its still forward and back…
This is all great work guys, I hope the next manipulator-based game sees you doing it again!
1731 had an arm that had 6 degrees of freedom and even though it was delicate and somewhat slow they could still get 5-6 rings/match if left alone. They did win the VCU Driving Tomorrow’s Technology award this year, and from talking to the students and mentors they have several ways it could be sped up.
Once FIRST moves to a new controller, if it has the capability of doing either integral math or at least a faster iterative processor then those pretty-pictured Matlab simulations for the control of this type of stuff could become a reality. Can’t wait to see.
Hi Zinefer,
You’re right. Team 910 did build a miniature arm that exactly replicated the arm of the robot. It rotated 360 degrees at the base, the shoulder had 180 degrees of forward back travel, the elbow was almost 360 degrees of rotation, and the gripper switch had 3 positions (open, loose, tight).
The operator moved the small arm (each joint being about 6 inches) in 3D space, and the robot copied the movement exactly. It used PID control so that if you made a quick move, it raced to keep up. Closest way to imagine it is how a cursor follows your mouse movement, only in 3D. We also built a 3 tier rack that had shelves that corresponded to each of the three levels of the spider legs. The operator could put the arm on a shelf and it would place the arm at the exact height necessary to reach over a leg and then drop the tube.
We also supplemented the controls with buttons for ground loading, wall loading, jogging left/right, locking the shoulder in place or freeing up left/right shoulder rotation, and three buttons for semi or full automatic capping on all three heights (low,mid,high) using our autonomous code. That last feature we didn’t implement until the off-season, but with our autonomous cranked up to hyper speed (4 seconds to drive 13 feet, score and release a tube) it made it pretty fun to hit that button and blast a tube on! Especially with a spoiler onto the back side of the rack at the end of a match. 
We also won an award for the design, the Xerox Creativity Award at Western Michigan. Such fun!
Take care!
so it did copy the exact position the miniature arm? when it was being driven it looked like it just went in the DIRECTION that the miniature arm was held… thanks! 
We did something similar to this before I joined 548. You can check it out here: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/21259