This week, we worked on many different individual parts of our project. We made progress on the hardware side by setting up a prototype tennis ball collector that allowed us to change the spacing of the motors that have the wheels that will collect the tennis balls. We were able to power the motors with a power supply from the Makerspace and control the motors using an Arduino. This allowed us to determine that our parts seem to be working and the wheel system will likely succeed in sucking up tennis balls.
We also continued to make progress on the software parts of our project. We further developed the computer vision algorithm to only detect objects that are the color of tennis balls so now any tennis balls in view of the camera will be marked with a target. Also, we were able to send commands to the iRobot Create 2 and control if to move and rotate. We still need to work on integrating these 2 pieces of software so that the computer vision code can also control the iRobot. This may be a challenge that we did not anticipate because the computer vision code is in C++ while the iRobot code is in Python. However, we have found that pybind is a library that could bridge these 2 languages.
Schedule Update
We are still moving according to the planned schedule and do not have any significant changes to the design of our project. One change we did want to make was to construct the arms of the robot that would gather the balls out of wood so that we can easily attach the motors to the arms and so that the arms would be sturdy. Our initial plan of using acrylic may not work out since it would be very difficult to cut and glue the acrylic together to make a sturdy arm. However, wood should not be expensive and should be relatively easy to obtain.