I worked on finishing the design report for this week and finalizing design choices and implementation details for the software. We decided to use a local database with Apple’s Core Data framework instead of the Open Food Facts API because having a database without the proper product name and price would lead to a bad user experience as certain details could be missing if we rely on an open source database. Thus we chose to create our own database with products from a local grocery store or an online store such as Amazon to simulate the database that a grocery store would have. Another detail we finalized was the pathfinding. We will be using D* Lite due to its strengths in dynamic environments and its simplicity compared to D*. The LiDAR coordinates will be converted into a cost matrix that will be fed into the algorithm as an input. In terms of resources, there is pseudocode and a few Python implementations of the algorithm that we will be referencing for this project.
I am behind schedule as last week as I planned to have the mobile app finalized, but I was unable to work on it due to finishing up the design report. To get back on track, I plan to spend this week finishing up the mobile app by creating the local database and finalizing the UI of the app. Unfortunately, this means that I will need to push back the implementation of LiDAR and obstacle detection, but since there is a slack week, I should be able to get it done by the interim demo.