The most significant risk at this point is that there’s still a lot of work to do and final demo is Monday. To try to mitigate this we are spending a lot of time on the project between now and then.
The main change to our design is that we will no longer be using the L515 Lidar scanner. This change was necessary because the fact that the L515 is no longer supported made it too hard to work with and integrate with ROS2 Jazzy. Instead we will be using the RPLIDAR C1 for the obstacle avoidance (and SLAM if there is time) and using a thermal camera for the detection.
The last time the schedule was updated was before the final presentation. The most up-to-date schedule can be seen in the final presentation slides.
While we have not been able to test all of the systems yet since they do not yet have working implementations, we have been able to conduct some tests:
- Movement: The robot is able to move forwards, backwards, turn, and rotate. The speed was of the robot was estimated and is about equal to our goal from the design requirements of 0.3 m/s.
- Dimensions: The robot’s dimensions are within those specified by the use case requirements.
- Battery life: The battery has been able to last far longer than the requirement of 20 minutes without being charged while the full system is running.
- Path planning: The robot is able to follow a pre-planned global path and update it with local path planning based on odometry data. However, this does decrease the speed of the robot since the robot must continuously reorient itself to modify its direction.