Progress of things completed since last status report:
- I finished setting up controlling the motors from the RPi. Now the RPi can control the motors and move the robot forward, backwards, turn it, and rotate it. There were some changes in wiring from our connection of the motor controllers with the RPi 5 to instead connect it to the RPi 4, and also I had to change the orientation of the mecanum wheels since the current setup was resulting in unsteady movement.
- I mounted the MPU6050 on the robot, soldered it so I could connect jumper wires, and connected it to the RPi. I got the MPU6050 to send IMU data to the RPi and publish the data in a ROS node to the topic /imu.
- I set up the RPLIDAR C1 and got the data displayed on the RPi and published to a ROS topic /scan. After spending a lot of time trying to get the L515 Lidar scanner to publish data to a ROS node I decided to pivot to the RPLIDAR C1 because there was no available software compatible with both the L515 (a no longer supported device) and ROS2 Jazzy (the current version of ROS).
- I integrated the path planning, odometry, and motor control with the actual robot. I took the software that Andy had written to run path planning in simulation and modified it to make it work with the actual robot. There were some difficult bugs to solve in this, such as fixing a race condition where the path planning node would sometimes publish the data before the controller node subscribed to the ROS topic, resulting in the controller node not receiving the path and failing to send velocities to the motors
Schedule update:
- I am currently behind schedule since by this point I had wanted to have everything completed and just need to do some final testing before the demo, but there is still a lot more to do.
- While it is impossible to get completely back on schedule by this point, I am spending a lot of time on the project now and trying to get as much to function on the robot as I can.
Deliverables to complete next:
- The main thing I want to complete next is integrating the obstacle avoidance with the robot. Since I have already gotten the data from the RPLIDAR C1 published to a ROS node and Andy has been working on the obstacle avoidance simulation, I’m optimistic that we can get obstacle avoidance completed before the final demo.
- If there is still time after implementing obstacle avoidance, I will also try to get SLAM completed before the final demo. Since the RPLIDAR C1 works and has a 360 degree scan this might be possible, but slam_toolbox had been difficult to run before and might also be hard to integrate so I’m not sure if I’ll be able to complete this. The priority right now is obstacle avoidance and if then I’ll see if I can get SLAM to work too.