This week I worked on the design for the path planning aspect of the project. However, since our design pivoted towards the end of the week, my previous design for the path planning is no longer particularly useful, so I had to begin looking at entirely different path planning starting Friday the 25th.
My prior path planning algorithm design was for multiple drones to search a large, outdoor area. This design involved first partitioning the search area into equal-area sections that could be assigned to drones, and then plotting a path for each drone to its section that could sweep it out using a simple rectangular pattern. A slide I had made for the design presentation on this algorithm is shown below:
However, since we are moving towards having a robot on the ground explore an indoor building, this path planning algorithm is not applicable to our new use case because the search area will have far more obstacles and be in an unknown configuration. So, I have begun looking into Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) and using pathing algorithms with that. The pathing will now have to be done onboard the robot rather than programmed beforehand, since the environment will be unknown at the start and determined in real time using SLAM. Based on some initial research, I am thinking that we will want to use Lidar for detecting walls in the environment.
The change in design has led me to be behind our original schedule since I had previously wanted to have the path planning fully designed and start working on implementation at this point. To catch up I plan to spend a lot of time over the weekend on designing the SLAM and new pathing, although with our design changes we will have to develop a new schedule for the project. By next week I hope to have fully designed the SLAM and path planning algorithm for our current project.