This week, we got multiple robots working and are working on robustifying the code to handle an arbitrary number of pallets and robots. We are working on testing the task planner heuristic and the backup controller once the robots drop off their pallets. We are on schedule and are hoping to start V&V testing soon. There are a few minor things to do, but we have made good progress on our project.
Saral’s Status Report 11/19/2022
This week I spent my time helping robustly our robot system to work well with numerous robots. Specifically, focused on making better, larger laminated goal drop off markers, scaling the visualizer to work with 4 fiducials, work on the reversing of the robots after a drop off, etc.
We’re almost on the validation phase and ready to collect metrics on the robot’s pickup and drop off based on our design goals and quantitive goal metrics.
Prithu’s Status Report for 11/19
As a team, this past week our overarching goal was to get multiple robots operating on the field simultaneously. To accomplish this, several modifications needed to be made to the planner. These included: fixing the planner heuristics for a more optimal path, restricting the buffer for the robot’s approach angle to the pallet on pickup, modifying the collision checker to be more efficient, and updating the robot collision radius. We also added the robot’s functionality to process several pallet pick-up rounds for situations where there are more pallets than robots on the field.
Omkar’s Status Report for 11/19
This week, we got two robots working with pick-up and drop-off working. I re-tuned the PID values on our robots so that they follow the path much more closely than before (we’ve previously had issues with the robot being unable to correct its y-error). I fixed a bug in the visualizer where old target positions were being persistently displayed. I am still working on a way for our robots to move backward after they have dropped off the pallets since I programmed the controller to only drive the robots forward along the path. So on the backup path, the robots try to turn 180 degrees and then move forward instead of backing up and then turning 180 degrees. This difference causes our robots to sometimes hit the pallet that they just dropped off. Our progress seems to be on track, and we are trying to robustify pickup and dropoff so that the pallets are consistently being picked up and moved so that there are no collisions between robots. We are very close to our MVP, and hopefully, we will get to a place soon where we can start running validation and verification tests.
Omkar’s Status Report for 11/12
We did the interim demo this week and learned that we will probably need our own router to combat other people’s traffic on the network. We also need to improve the PID gains to correct for the y-error. I worked to improve the reliability of the pickup and tried to fix issues in the code where we’ve hardcoded for 1 robot. It seems to be simple fixes like dynamically changing the robot URL.
Saral’s Status Report for 11/12/2022
(Disclaimer: This was a quieter week for capstone progress due to my hands being tied with a lot of other classes that had major deadlines due around this time. )
This week I focused on improving reliability with the pallet pickup especially in the weight transfer and poor traction of the robot after it picked up the pallet. Specifically, I learnt how to use the Waterjet in techspark and cut a bunch of prototype pallet pieces for us to try and pick up. We intend to do integration on this tomorrow (Sunday) morning.
I also focused on making the codebase parallel robot friendly as a couple of the functions were only optimized for handling one robot and we’re now scaling to multiple bots.
Team Status Report for 11/12
(Disclaimer: This was a quieter week for capstone progress due to our hands being tied with a lot of other classes that had major deadlines due around this time. )
As a team, we demoed a version of our project to the TAs and professors. In this version we had one robot driving from an arbitrary start point to a pallet, picking it up, and navigating to a goal point to drop off the pallet. Through getting ready for the demo we were able to discover some bugs related to the planner, and controller software which we are going to address tomorrow (Sunday).
Prithu’s Status Report for 11/12
I had a major scholarship interview scheduled for today so basically, all of my week was dedicated to mock interviews and other prep for it. As a result, I wasn’t able to get any work done for our Capstone project.
Team status report 11/5
Last week our team was able to make 1 robot follow an arbitrary path in the field. This week our goal was to robust-ify that so we can put pallets on the field and have the robot pick them up!
We fell a little short of that goal but are able to pick up the pallets with a ~50% reliability. The issues we ran into were the planner not being able to find a path occasionally, and the robot doing hard corners around the path being planned.
The first problem with the planner is being actively addressed and the second problem with the hard corners has now been fixed with the updated cubic spline implementation!
We also upgraded the network/communication latency with the robots using multi-threading to give us much better performance with our PID error controller.
Our goal for next week is to continue to improve the pickup reliability via the approach angle and also add multiple robots into the loop!
Saral’s status Report for 11/5
Since the computer vision has been pretty much done and stable, I focused my efforts this week on improving various smaller odds-and-ends to improve the group’s standing and progress.
Some of the things I worked on was adding safety features around the velocity control and also scaling the velocities appropriately when the thresholds were overshot.
I also helped work on manufacturing 2 pallets for use to use in our testing.
I also helped out with some of the debugging around cubic-spline generation to smoothen out the path and make it easier for the robot to follow.