Arushi – This week I worked with Pallavi to identify what our target image will be and then we took model videos with the target attached to my back. Based on the videos I was able to iterate on my general computer vision algorithm to be able to more accurately draw a circle, and print its parameters, based on the target image. The next step on this end would to take a video where the target stays still and the camera moves up until it is the closest safe distance for the cart to be able to calibrate how we can use the target radius to detect the distance between the cart and the human. I also began designing a model on how we are going to place our hardware on the iRobot create. For next week, I plan on working with my teammates to figure out how we will interface our separate components now that we have proof of concepts for all the separate components.
Shreyas – This week I was primarily in charge of setting up the Raspberry Pi and the iRobot. Getting the Pi on the CMU wifi was a slight bottleneck but eventually it connected. I installed basic libraries and text editors that we would use later. Then I looked into the pyCreate2 python library which provides good abstraction layer to interface with the iRobot. I tested sending basic movement commands and they seemed to work. I started testing reading the sensor data from the iRobot, but more elaborate testing needs to be done.
Pallavi – This week I worked with Arushi to take some videos to train our open CV model. After helping with that, I mainly focused on working with the ultrasonic sensors. I started by individually testing each sensor, and I found one sensor that wasn’t reading in valid responses. I then started setting up the sensors in the orientation we want to use them for our final design. Next week, I will work with Arushi and Shreyas to get a better idea of how we will integrate all of our parts, especially now that we have a little bit of the individual parts working. I also want to look more into the library functions actually used to detect objects. Now that I have the general setup taken care of, I want to implement our detection algorithm and test it.
All of us will be working on the design presentation at the beginning of this week and also work on the design proposal concurrently. Working on this presentation will hopefully help us with our other goal of figuring out exactly how we want all of our individual parts to fit together.