CDR - The show will go on

The CDR is just over, and we are already back at work in Pisa now. A joint meeting will be held on Tuesday to give everybody a detailed report of what happened in Noordwijk and to plan the next activities.

Our team has been represented at the review by Stefano Roccella, Calogero Oddo, Nicola Vitiello and Roberto Farolfi. The CDR has been successful for everybody, so eight groups will be (hopefully) participating at the final challenge in Tenerife, October 21st - 28th. According to what stated by ESA officers, it will be a great event. Press and TV have been invited. We suggest everybody to have a holiday there during the challenge.

Yes, now it's time to unveil some details about our design. By now, you will get this nice image of the robot in the "folded" position.

Fun facts in Noordwijk

After the presentation, we decided to test our walking strategies "on the field".

Press review (while waiting for the CDR results)

The Critical Design Review, for which we have been working, is scheduled to begin tomorrow. While we were giving the final touch to the various documents we've prepared, we've discovered that our work has not been unnoticed by the rest of the world.
Here's a few articles about us (and our truly dreaded derby opponent, the University of Pisa). Most of them come from Italian newspapers, so unfortunately they're written in our beloved language. We promise that after the CDR we will unveil a glimpse of our robot design. Well ... we may ;-)

The really printed press:

• La Repubblica , one of the most popular Italian newspaper (and its regional issue)
  
• AdKronos , a famous Italian press agency
• La Nazione and Qn, local newspapers

And, of course, some blogs.

-4 to CDR

Just 4 days to the CDR.
The time schedule has been pretty tight, but it seems that we have done more than we expected. In the last week we got the dynamic simulator working. The mechanical design team has almost finished the 3D modelling. The end-effector has been completely re-designed. The computer specialists are still trying to cope with a serious bandwidth issue, but a lot of working code has already been written.

Now we are supposed to bring all the work together and prepare the presentations for the CDR. Yeah, we are probably going to spend the next nights doing that.

See you in Noordwijk,

the pESApod team

PS: Uh, we still did not publicly disclose what actually pESApod stands for. Maybe at next update.