Arushi – This week, I looked more into homography using checkerboards to further understand the process of when we implement turns. Basically, for us, based on what I learned, we will use the angle between the circles’ center to determine which way the human is turning. Furthermore, we established that in general, when it comes to turns, the cart will only move if the human (and thus the closest circle) is getting smaller, to prevent the cart from turning when a human pivots to pick something off from the shelf. I also worked on porting over my code to the raspberry pi and combining the image processing with Shreyas’ robot control/pid module. Because we had no way to adhere the camera to the robot, we tested with me moving the target in front of the stationary camera and the robot moved accordingly (in terms of the general direction). Thus the next step is to actually attach the camera to the robot and test it, which is the plan for next week. To be able to do so, Ben helped us in making a wooden base for a post to hold the camera.
Pallavi – This week, I continued to work on the ultrasonic sensors. In order to actual start working on the serial connection between the arduino and the pi, I wanted to actually set up the USB connection between the two. Because Arushi and Shreyas were mainly focusing on integrating the iRoomba and the openCV, the main raspberry pi was being used. Instead, I got a leftover Pi from a project from a previous semester (thanks Ben!) and spent a good amount of time setting it up. Because the pi leftover only had one USB port, it was kind of difficult setting it up since I could only use the mouse or the keyboard. I’ve got the basics set up, but I plan on going into lab early on Monday to set up ssh on the pi so I can connect the Arduino Uno to the usb port. With that, my goal is to have the entire design – detecting values, sending the interrupt when an obstacle is detected, and the serial communication done by the time I leave lab on Monday.
Shreyas – This week was mostly making the core of the Robot Control Module. This included adding PID control, so I had to figure out the right constraints and tune the controller to our iRoomba. I also added the interfacing between the Robot Control Module and the Image Processing Module. The PID controller took the center of the target found in the image processing module and sent the necessary motor commands to the iRoomba. The x displacement currently works so the next steps are the z displacement. I also will be adding the iRoomba’s sensors obstacle detection as well in the coming week. Another issue I had to work with was optimizing the connection of the raspberry pi camera. Originally the FPS was very low but by figuring out another method to get the frames we got the FPS to be a lot faster (around 30 now). Now the main latency comes from the image processing module.
All – next week we plan to focus on testing of our initial milestone of the cart following the human down a relatively straight path and stopping when the human does. We expect that we will have to change some of the color detecting constants based on the camera and the pid constants as we continue to test.