Week 6: Debugging + Regrouping

Hello Everyone, and welcome back to my blog! This week was a bit different since I was on spring break and didn’t have access to my sensors. So instead of collecting new data, I focused on debugging and trying to fix some of the issues I’d been running into.

One thing I experimented with was rotating the model to better align the torso. I tested a few different rotation configurations: -90, 0, 0; 0, 90, 0; 90, 0, 0; and -90, 0, 180. My goal was to get the torso into a more natural starting position, since it had been appearing misaligned in previous runs. However, all of the rotations yielded no better motion than before—the torso was still twisted in a sitting-like position relative to the legs.

I tried approaching another issue I faced last week: missing sensors. To combat that, I went back through my code to double-check that all the sensors were properly mapped. That’s when I realized that in my placement file the head and upper body sensors were missing, which explained why certain segments weren’t behaving correctly. However, when I tried adding them back, my code started producing errors, which was the initial reason why I deleted it from my original code. This is something that I will have to take another closer look at.

At this point, I think the most reliable next step is to retake the data entirely, since there may be inconsistencies from earlier recordings from either the sensors being misaligned while placed or the data gathered just not being how the OpenSim software wanted it to be collected.

Since I couldn’t collect new data this week, I shifted focus to something else: figuring out why the example code itself wasn’t working. After carefully checking all the file formats and rerunning everything, I was finally able to get it working properly. I think previously I skipped one of the rotating and calibration steps which made the motion produced kind of wacky. Fixing this issue was a big relief and gave me a better reference point moving forward as I now know that the OpenSim software itself does indeed work.

In this following week I’m planning to re-collect data with corrected sensor mappings and hopefully get more accurate motion results by rerunning the new data. Thanks for reading, see you guys in the next one!