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Andy’s Status Report for October 4

This week, I worked with my teammates on the design review presentation and continued developing the vehicle design. After evaluating different options, I decided that a chassis equipped with magnum wheels would be the best foundation for our vehicle, as it should provide strong mobility and maneuverability. Overall, I am on schedule.

My next step is to explore the motor controller and control algorithms, focusing on how to make the robot turn or rotate effectively. By next week, I plan to finalize most of the design, order the required parts, and complete the design report.

Additionally, I looked into another robot platform called iRobot Create. It is a highly programmable and capable system, but it is no longer widely available. The inventory currently lists iRobot Vacuum models, so I plan to investigate whether they can serve as a substitute. If they are suitable, I may adjust our vehicle design accordingly.

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Team Status Report for October 4

The main risk at this point is that we are still working on the details of how many of the systems will work, and we aren’t yet sure what problems will arise as we try to implement our designs. For example, we are still figuring out exactly how the pathing algorithm will work and where the robot will decide to go (though this will come into more focus once we have an initial version of the SLAM system completed so we can see exactly what the input to the pathing algorithm will look like). To manage these risks, we plan to start implementing our software on the actual Raspberry Pi so we can refine the designs by seeing how they will be implemented. We have ordered the Raspberry Pi and it is ready for pickup from the ECE Inventory, so we can get it first thing Monday morning.

Last week a lot of the design was uncertain, but we have worked a lot more on the design for the design review presentation. There have not been any major changes to the design since the design review presentation. However, we are still working on refining our design and going into greater detail for the design review report. There have also not been any changes to the schedule since the design review presentation.

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Jeremy’s Status Report for October 4

This week I worked on the design for the SLAM subsystem. After doing some research, I determined that a Scan Matching-based 2D Lidar SLAM method would probably be the most effective for our use case. I read the papers A Review of 2D Lidar SLAM Research (Yan et al. 2025) and A Flexible and Scalable System with Full 3D Motion Estimation (Kohlbrecher et al. 2011) as part of this research. The first provided explanations of many SLAM systems which I used to evaluate which would be most effective for our use case. The second went into greater detail on a specific Scan Matching-based algorithm called Hector SLAM, which they also provide in open-source software. I think that this is a good initial design for our SLAM system, and that the open-source software can be used as a starting point for our software. I also worked on the slides for the design review presentation.

My progress right now is on schedule. My goal was to have an initial design for the SLAM algorithm by the end of this week, which I think I have accomplished.

By next week, I hope to have completed an initial version of the software that will demonstrate that the design is feasible, and to begin working on implementing it on the Raspberry Pi. I think that this should be doable by using the open-source software for Hector SLAM as a starting point for our software for the SLAM system.