This week, I worked on creating a Pygame simulation to observe the behavior of the cart when using the virtual force algorithm. The simulation works by grabbing 20 LiDAR scans of the environment and creating a virtual mapping of the environments. From here, the shopping cart is added into the environment and the computer’s mouse acts as the shopper. While you move the mouse, the shopping cart, which is visualized as a red dot, attempts to follow the mouse and navigate any potential obstacles. When the mouse is far away from the cart, the cart speeds up to catch up to the mouse. For the most part, the virtual force algorithm does a good job of navigating the obstacles, but there are cases in which the cart gets stuck.
I am still behind in progress since we have not been able to integrate the parts together since we still have not received our Raspberry Pi that we ordered. Instead, I have been focusing on trying to get the obstacle detection to work on its own so there will be less debugging when integrating with the motors. Hopefully our Raspberry Pi will be delivered next week so we can make progress with integration.