This week I spent the majority of my time prepping for the Proposal presentation to give in class on Wednesday. I also spent time researching chassis to build our robot upon, weighing the pros and cons of the available cheap models. I ordered our first robot chassis in order to start prototyping ASAP
Team Status Report for 09/19
The most significant risk that could jeopardize the success of the project is a delay in building a single functional robot. Most of our team effort this week was allocated to sourcing the parts for the robot, which for now is the compute + motor chassis. We are making the first order early, but only ordering a small number of components so we have enough budget in case the first batch does not meet our requirements.
We made one minor change to the system since the proposal presentation. The proposal outlines DOOR-SLAM as an example of a distributed SLAM algorithm, but since DOOR-SLAM uses cameras instead of LiDAR, we will not be using it and are still searching for a LiDAR-based distributed SLAM algorithm designed for ROS2.
Zhuoyi’s Status Report for 09/19
This week, I focused on researching and setting up initial code for the robot communication infrastructure. I built some sample communication code for ROS2 and set up a Ubuntu Linux Docker environment to run the sample code. The sample code currently sets up a skeleton for P2P communication over ROS2, but from my experimentation, ROS2 should have a library already for the complex communication we need, so we do not need to build everything from scratch.
The progress is on schedule, next week I will be working with Kevin to integrate a distributed SLAM implementation into our ROS2 infrastructure.