Our goal was to accurately pick up the cars and place them correctly on the board. Accurately in this case means that the car was placed so that the game is playable, so it was allow to error in front or behind the car but not to the side of the cars.
We were forced to move away from the very small rush hour pieces because the ar_tags that were fixable to the cars were too small for the camera in Baxter's hand to reliably detect. Because of this we moved to using foam blocks and a handmade cardboard playing board.
After switching to the bigger pieces we proceeded with our code. However we found that actuating Baxter's grippers would knock other pieces when they would open to grab or release the car on the board. For this reason we switched to using the suction cup end effector.
The suction cup end effector was much better for making clean accurate grabs and drops. However, the width of the blocks was very nearly the same as the diameter of the suction cup and it was not reliably creating a seal in order to pick up the block. To remedy this, we created cardboard "hats" for the cars so that a seal between the suction cup and the car would more reliably be created.
Cardboard "hat"
