This past week, our team made good progress on both the software and hardware part of the project. On the hardware side, we purchased and cut wood for some of the components of the tennis ball launching system. When we tried this last week, we were using scrap wood which wasn’t good quality and were not using a machine that allowed us to be precise with our cuts. Learning from this, we were able to cut the wood exactly as we wanted and created the railings for the ramp and well as the components for mounting the motors. We also decided to use wood glue to connect the pieces instead of screws since this allowed us to cut at whichever angle we needed since screws were expensive as well as difficult to use at angles other than 90 degrees. After testing the strength of the wood glue, we found it to be more than strong enough.
On the software, we were able to get all our software so far to run together on the Nvidia Jetson Nano. This includes the code to communicate with the Inteal Realsense camera, the iRobot Create 2, and the computer vision code that uses OpenCV. We fixed the issues regarding building the python library for the Realsense camera and some other issues caused by moving from Windows to Linux. Now the Create 2 turns towards the closest tennis ball it sees with the Realsense Camera and moves towards it. We couldn’t perfectly test the system since the Jetson Nano is powered from the wall currently instead of the battery and is not portable.
Schedule Update:
Currently, we are on schedule on the software side of things and slightly behind for hardware. Next week, we will try to power the Jetson Nano with a battery so that we can better test how well the computer vision is working. Also, we will spend a lot of time on the hardware which involves cutting acrylic and finishing building the ramp. We will also try and mount the parts we have on the Create 2 Robot, or at least try to cut the parts needed to mount the tennis ball launching system. There don’t seem to be any immediate challenges that are of concern.