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Team Status Report for 9/18/2021

As of today, we finalized our proposal for the presentation next week. This involved several kinematic models which we created earlier in the semester to better quantify our requirements.

One of the most significant risks we predict for our project is its ability to perceive the target and activate propulsion with minimal latency. We anticipate that the system will need some time for movement in between perception tasks (receiving and processing a signal from the target). The device may not move fast enough if the perception tasks are to close in time. We will manage this risk as we write the software for these perception tasks. This pause will be something to take into account when programming the device. We will also make sure directional antenna signal processing will require a small compute time. Our contingency plan would be to switch our perception method to computer vision, to detect visual markers on the ground.

No design changes or schedule changes have occurred yet.

Below is a drawing of our preliminary design:

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Daniel’s Status Report for 9/18/2021

 

This week,  I sat with my team and helped brainstorm and do the necessary calculations to figure out certain requirements of our project, such as lateral drop distance as well as landing accuracy. These are crucial to estimate how we expect our device to behave, and what design considerations are relevant to make it behave in the way we want. I also personally worked on the proposal slides for the upcoming presentation this week. I had to distill all the information we came up with during our calculations and group discussions into an easily understandable format for the viewers. This involved summarizing our project problem statement and solution in such a way that the audience understands why our device exists. Additionally, calculations had to be summarized and combined alongside diagrams to properly explain how the project works, why the requirements we chose make sense, and why we expect it to work (by explaining the kinematic calculations we worked on this past week).

 

As of right now, I believe we are on schedule as we have finalized the project idea, as well as core requirements. As for next steps, we are going to begin the design phase of the project. We will begin experimenting with water bottles attached to parachutes, as well as antennas to figure out certain design elements of our final device, such as which type of motors are appropriate as well as antenna setup.