Team Update
Our risk from last week remains: poor lighting causing OpenCV to fail to detect faces. We plan to test our robot in Wiegand Gym to simulate the conditions of the final demo, as suggested by Professor Nace, to make sure our robot will perform as desired.
Another risk is the communication received from the Arduinos – there is often garbage data (most likely because the signals are coming too fast over the serial port and things are sent before they can be read, causing overlaps and malfunctions). We are mitigating this using regex at the moment, which seems to work. Through more testing, we may be able to see if this is a long-term solution. If it is not, we may need to send the data at longer time intervals.
Another risk is the signals we receive from the thermal camera sensor. When tested in isolation, the thermal camera sensor behaves exactly as expected. However, once attached to the whole system, it detects human body signatures even when they’re not present. We are still trying to figure this problem out.
Currently, we are using cardboard pieces and cardboard boxes to hold up our RPi and camera. This is obviously not a final product. We will be shifting this to permanent structures using the Balsa wood we have already purchased and laser-cut for other parts of the project. In addition, we will be making an enclosure for all of our wires as well as moving wires out of bread-boards and instead soldering them together for a permanent solution.
Our Gantt chart remains the same. It’s attached here for easy reference:
Adriel
I spent this week testing individual sensors and soldering the wires onto the pins of the IR sensors. I wired up these sensors and the thermal sensor to the Arduino and situated all of our individual components on the top half of our robot for our midsemester demo. After examining several alternatives, I’ve decided to take a different approach to the motorized stick by using a stepper motor attached to a string to raise and lower the platform that the Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi camera will be on. Additionally, I spent time reading the required textbook chapters for Reading Assignment 2 and writing a reflection.
My progress is currently behind schedule because I haven’t procured all of the materials required for the modified version of the “motorized stick”. I have tried to offset the impact of this setback by preparing everything necessary for LCD display integration so that it can be completed as quickly as possible.
Next week, I hope to have the stepper motor platform completed. Additionally, I hope to have the LCD display integrated into our robot.
Mimi
This week I spent 12+ hours alone with the rest of our team preparing for our mid-semester demo, debugging in lab and testing our robot behavior, and soldering sensors. Aside from that, I also worked on updating our detailed Gantt chart and learning how to increase image resolution. Lastly, I spent a significant amount of time reading the chapters and writing a reflection for our second reading assignment.
My progress is currently on schedule.
In the next week, I will work with Cornelia on adding code to move the Roomba according to photo specifications. This will include moving forwards and backwards, and up and down based on the margins of faces in the photo, which are detected with OpenCV. Additionally, I will work on trying to speed up the process of uploading photos to the cloud.
Cornelia
This past week was jam-packed! This week was focused on soldering wires to the tiniest pins on the back of our IR sensors (this took so long, my goodness) and assembling our robot. We ran into problems regarding powering our Raspberry Pi (which is running all of our code, uploading images to a Dropbox folder over wifi, and powering the attached Arduinos) but found out which cords and battery packs we had would work. We constructed temporary stands and mounts for our RPi and camera at the top of our robot. We spent a lot of time testing then got ready for our mid-semester demo on Wednesday! After our demo, we soldered the rest of our sensors (all 18) and discovered that some don’t work. We will need to order some more to replace those and a few more as back-up. On the programming side, I had to refine a lot of the code involving parsing of lines read from the Arduinos and integration of image capture code. At the end of the week, I focused my efforts on the second reading assignment which involves both reading two chapters of The Pentium Chronicles as well as writing a reflection and submitting that to Canvas.
According to our Gantt chart, I am on schedule.
This next week, I will be working with Mimi to optimize photos and their margins. The deliverable is the robot being able to move forwards and backwards, up and down, based on the margins around faces in the photos captured. Once all the IR sensors are attached, I will be able to use all of them to implement a vote system for more accurate human detection as well. In addition, I will be cleaning up the code that has been weakly stitched together for mid-semester demo.