The big issue of yesterday: one of the tendons in the left arm of EVE was damaged. Today, in the morning, the problem almost seemed fixed. We got an alternative for the zip ties we were missing (we used some strong spare rope which belonged to a spare haptic glove). However, when testing the full system, we still noticed some very strong vibrations.
After inspection of the arm, we noticed that further repairs were needed… And these repairs unfortunately took much more time than anticipated. This means we were still not able to do the dry run in our hotel.
This also meant the team had some additional time, which was spent by making an hour by hour planning for the competition, optimizing the training scheme for the untrained operator judges, doing some additional preparations for the competition in the Convention Center and visiting the beach.
Some good news at least: Jan and Stefano joined the team at the Inn at 50 in Long Beach, which increased our team counter to 9. As we wanted to stick around the Inn to keep working on the repairs, we ordered take-out food today. And as we don’t really have tables in our rooms, this meant we had to have a cozy dinner in our hotel parking lot.
Not only our human team had two new additions today. Our robot family was also extended with two new members. As the current strategy for the repairs involves using spare robot parts, and as the spare robot parts are still attached to other robots, we now have three EVE robots in our improvised LA hotel room.
That was all for today. Hopefully we can get EVE back to his/her regular self-tonight, and we can start our dry run tomorrow! We’ll keep you updated!
