Team B2: Lights Out

This week I was primarily focused on writing up the Design Proposal Report. I wrote out the Abstract, Introduction, and Design Requirements Sections.

Next week we plan on testing the PIR sensors to  verify our formation, and include it as part of our preliminary testing for our Design Proposal Report . We are still waiting on the microphones. With the Design Proposal Report being due on Wednesday that is my primary focus this week.

Diva and I ordered the parts for our project and looked into the wifi capabilities of the Raspberry Pi.

This week we worked together on finalizing our presentation and ordering the parts we needed. We continued to research parts and tools such as the beam forming and comparing various types of microphones.

This week I focused on editing the slides for our design review presentation and preparing to present. I also began working with my team on our design review report. In addition, I worked on setting up the Node MCU for wifi communication. 

This week I plan to continue working on the Design Review writeup and do some meaningful research in my focus areas to flush out our design review and implementation details. 

This week I spend time researching methods that take into account uncertainty and methods that combine sensor data to localize a person.  From our collective research, we concluded that we wanted to focus more on IR sensors for tracking movement around the room and use the microphone to enhance and verify a person’s position especially in cases of little to no movement. We decided to switch from sound to PIR motion detection for our primary input data for locating, because our TA brought up latency issues when using analog sound data from microphones and we found a lot of papers that used PIR sensors for tracking positions around a room.

We received a few parts at the end of the week, so Ryan and I were able to set up the raspberry pi and test out one PIR sensor’s range capabilities. We also collectively worked on our Design Presentation Slides.

This week I spent quite a bit of time researching various techniques for tracking multiple humans in a room using IR sensors. There are a few proposed algorithms for tracking paths of people in a room and distinguishing between multiple individuals. I worked to order these algorithms so that  when our parts arrive I can start testing as soon as possible. I also looked into some videos on how to set these up and coming up with and researching simple heuristic techniques for human tracking.

We are still early in the project but we seem to be on schedule. We are hoping to get our parts in soon (we submitted our order this past week) so that we can start testing. 

This coming week I plan to continue researching setup and tracking algorithms and possibly begin to play around with a few heuristical approaches provided that our sensors get in soon. 

This week, I worked with my team to further brainstorm our requirements, and decide which items we would like to order. I have been working on our proposal slides and researching technological limitations and challenges we may face, regarding the localization using a combination of sound and motion detection. We’ve also discussed our division of work and schedule.