Hardware portion almost finished:
After replacing our broken webcam with a USB camera, we continued our testing. This week, we combined our obstacle avoiding algorithm with our human avoiding algorithm together. Now, our alarm clock robot is fully functional with all our requirements reached. The complete algorithm is as followed: the robot starts self rotate at its idle stage while playing the song when no person is detected through camera. As soon as a person is detected through the camera, robot will start moving in the direction away from him/her while trying to fix this person’s position in the middle of the camera. Yet if obstacles are encountered, the robot will immediately start self rotate and move in the direction where no obstacles are detected through its sensors. At that point on, the robot will look back at its camera again to find the person. If the person is still in its view, it will perform the above action. If the person is not in its view, the robot will start self rotating until it finds a person again. As one might see, avoiding obstacles take priority over avoiding user. The “finish action/ alarm turn off action” will be done next week. That is, when the robot runs into a wall, the entire program finishes. A problem we encountered is that the distance information we received from IRobot Create2’s sensors to detect nearby obstacles sometimes blows up to completely inaccurate numbers. In that case, our entire program runs into undefined behavior and crashes. We have not yet find a solution to this problem.
(avoiding both human and obstacles demo)
(avoiding human only demo)
Integration with Webapp:
Now, we are stating to work on sockets and how raspberry pi communicates with Webapp from Yuhan’s website. Next week, we will work on how to let the Webapp controls the entire on and off of our program and how webapp sends ringtone and time to raspberry pi.