This week I discussed with team members on the feedback we received from the professor and TA. We worked on the presentation slides together, confirmed the division of labor, and wrote up the proposed schedule for designing and building the robot. I did some individual research on the hardware specifications and physical design of the wheelbase. I looked up relevant technical documents for the Jetson Nano board, Raspberry Pi board, Arduino boards, related electronics components, as well as the design report from past teams’ projects. I notice a potential issue of the wheelbase is that using omniwheels would be the most efficient way for the robot to move considering the vertical movement of reaching the object and the lateral movement of scanning through the items. However, only Arduino boards have enough PWM pins to connect to 2 motor drivers to control 4 wheels separately. There exist many successful robot projects with omniwheels controlled through an Arduino which is communicating with another computer board. I remain positive that the latency between a computer board and the Arduino would not be a significant issue. Since designing and building a wheel chassis is a relatively new experience to me, I also looked at various existing designs and posts on how to build wheel chassis from scratch.
For the next week, I would work on the CAD of the wheelbase, and order the physical components after the presentation. I hope to complete the majority of the design next week.