This week I spent a lot of time working with the team constructing the robot. Together, we spent a lot of time assembling the pieces that we cut last week onto the Roomba. We mounted the arms and the ramp to the mounting plate and placed it on the Roomba. Now the exterior of the robot is pretty much complete.
On the software side, I worked with Ishaan and we were able to move the robot using the Jetson Nano and the battery fully untethered. We simply taped the camera onto the front robot and tried to get it to follow a tennis ball. This worked pretty well. Additionally, I also helped set up the motors to be controlled by the power supply.
This week, I plan on creating a platform to place the camera on the robot as well as test the algorithm with static balls. This test will be performed both indoors as well as outdoors. Currently, we have not tested the robot with multiple static balls on the scene. We have only had one ball that we moved around to make sure that the robot is detecting it well. Depending on the performance from the testing, I will decide what the next steps for improvement are.