The main risks and difficulties at this point are as a result of hardware for the systems breaking. Neither the Lidar scanner nor the thermal is working at this point, and we suspect that both of these hardware components are broken. There is the additional difficulty here of that we are now out of budget. To manage this, we have ordered a replacement Lidar scanner and possible cameras we could use for detection from the ECE inventory. A further risk from the hardware difficulties is that the project is now behind schedule and we do not have much time left to complete the project. To manage this we are trying to simplify the design of the project and aim to finish as many subsystems as we can as quickly as possible (for example the motor control and movement subsystem is almost completed).
There have been some design changes as a result of the different hardware components no longer working. We have ordered a new Intelsense L515 Lidar scanner from the ECE inventory, and we will be using this Lidar scanner instead of the RPLIDAR A1. We also plan to simplify our design by using normal camera data instead of a thermal camera. We ordered two cameras from the ECE inventory which we can test out to see if they work for the detection subsystem.
The schedule at this point is no longer something we can achieve as a result of the hardware difficulties we encountered. We are now aiming to finish and integrate whatever we can before the final demo.
Full system testing and validation has not been considered much recently since we are not very close to getting the full system working. Our original plan for validation was to test the robot in an environment, such as the HH1300 wing, as if it were in real use after a disaster.