This week we focused on our propulsion system as a team. We added weights to the inside of the device, to combat the swinging problems we faced before. The weights were successful in removing swing, but the insufficient lateral movement from our propellers was still a problem. Vikram suggested that the problem was that the connectors between the ESC and the motors were too thin to handle the current. While he made new connectors, Daniel and I created a new thrust testing apparatus at TechSpark. We went for a new design that we saw online, consisting of a pillar, with the propeller at the top. This would allow airflow which is important, so the propulsion is not impeded. We were able to generate 70 grams more with the thicker wires.
Since the camera to motion pipeline seemed to work in the demo setup, it was important that we also tested the CV in the actual testing setting. So we headed to the Pausch bridge to see the camera feed and detection. We tried to change the thresholds and parameters around, but found that the 1m target we have was miniscule because of the fisheye lens. The fisheye lens does not seem optimal for our use case namely, it distorts shapes the further they are from the center of the frame and downsizes shapes that closer to the center. It likely that a equirectangular camera will work just fine for our project, because the field of view from 43′ height can easily cover a 3 meter radius. Keeping with the fisheye lens, we could try a software algorithm to correct fisheye to equirectangular. Or more simply, we could enlarge the center of the frame, discarding data on the edges of the frame, because this is the only data we are concerned with. A backup plan is to use a USB webcam.