Attached are a few videos of our final project, our final presentation and paper!
Video 1 (showing each feature separately)
Video 2 (walking through our aisles, as we did during our demos + smoothed out drive compared to Video 1)
Weekly Status Report – Week of 11/24
Pallavi – I spent the first half of this week working with Shreyas to drill in the ultrasonic sensor mounts and the arduino to a secure platform. After setting up the mounts, I re-wired all the sensors and secured the wires to carti-b so there are no visible wires anymore!
The second half of the week was spent setting up the testing and demo configuration in the room. We used poster boards to construct aisles for carti-b to go through, and we plan on attaching candy canes to the aisles to simulate a grocery store setting. I also worked with Arushi to debug the turning mechanism because of inconsistency with carti-b moving forward.
Arushi – I worked one trying to fix a few parts of our implementation, namely the color detection and the turn outing of aisle aspects. I tried to use orange, pink and yellow instead of the green and red circles due to the chance of false positives. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to better cater the hsv values to these colors more than green and yellow. As a result, tomorrow I am going to modify our target to be a green circle with a yellow smaller circle in it, where I can check for concentric circles. I also worked with Pallavi to test inconsistency of our turns, we were able to identify the problem as being issues with the robot’s direct commands, so I am going to go in with Shreyas tomorrow to change the mechanism to not send a certain distance for the robot to move, but rather turn on the motors and turn them off after a corresponding time based on the distance.
Shreyas – The first half of the week I spent securing everything on the robot. I drilled holes in the mid level platform to secure the ultrasonic sensor mounts and the arduino with zipties onto the platform. We also drilled the camera onto the wooden pole instead of using tape. I also replaced the camera cable with the new shorter one we bought so that there would be less latency in getting the camera feed and also to prevent the cable from getting tangled on anything. I also helped Pallavi in making our demo environment with the poster boards. The second half of the week I spent making the obstacle avoidance path planning more accurate. I realized that using the framework’s angle and distance commands are not accurate enough so I manually did the angle turns and distance commands using a timer. This helped a lot. I also changed the algorithm so the robot only executes the obstacle avoidance paths if the obstacle is in the way for more than 2 seconds. We decided this is better because most obstacles usually are humans walking through or another cart and wont’ stay in front of the robot for too long. This also reduces the lag between the robot having to execute the obstacle avoidance path and catching up with the human.