The Ghost of 8.01 Past

I thought I was done with physics, especially mechanics. That was the whole point of going through AP C Physics.. I would get a 5 on the AP Tests and pass out of 8.01 (Physics- Mechanics) at MIT. No more free body diagrams. No more weird vectors and torques...

I was clearly wrong. After correcting my adviser that no, I was not a Mechanical Engineer, I sat down with large, heavy complicated looking books to re-learn physics and mechanics and then tackle kinematics. Luckily mechanics (the basics of it at least) are fairly straigtforward..

Unfortunately, when it comes to robotic manipulators physics gets rather complicated fairly quickly. Like really, really quickly. You thought it was bad when your equation had 4 solutions, 2 extraneous? Try to find the correct solution when there's 40 "solutions", AFTER simplifying the system of equations a whole bunch. (Initially 2^12 theoretically or something..)

So, yea learning about parallel manipulators was a ton of fun today. Also quite mathy. That's one fairly good thing. Math (especially vector calculus/ linear algebra) has been around for so long that despite one of the texts being in German, I was able to at least sort of sort my way through the math.

Which went on forever. They start you out nice with really simple equations, such as the one to figure out how many degrees of freedom there are in a system. One, maybe two variables, no multiplication. If only it stayed like that.

By the end, I had a 3-4 page step by step process to get you to the equation with 16 solutions (8 mirrored pairs) to how you could possibly move the pistons on a Stewart-Gough Platform to get a desired f and m (force and moment vectors for the center of the platform). You know it's getting hairy when you can make words out of single variables: superscript i, v (with a dot over it), superscript (the other side now) T, subscript (bi). Unfortunately I was unable to figure out how to get this to show that so you'll have to use some imagination.

The nice thing though, was despite the hard work, the Germans don't pull long hours here too much. When it's five, it's time to leave (Just like when it's around 8 or 9, it's time to arrive, and 11:45 is the time to eat) and you don't do work doing that time. At all. It's like taboo or something. Maybe MIT has warped my perception of the world, but I was shocked to see so many people up and about on a Tuesday evening. Doing things for fun. Like not activity or sport or school or studying related. But relaxing. It was so weird. I can't decide yet if that's going to make me more or less likely to work hard. Guess I'll have to wait and see.