Status Report 05/04

Aditya Ranade

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week.

This week, I worked on improving the computation time of the robot. We keep the map constant between determining frontiers and finding the trajectory. As a result, we get both the results with only one service call. This reduced our computation time from 17s to around 10-11s.

  • Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

We are finished with our project and just making minor optimizations to improve obstacle avoidance and reduce time taken.

  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

Final Report!

Akshat Jain

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week.

This week we worked mainly on setting up a cardboard maze that resembles our demo space. We tested our robot multiple times in this maze ensuring the thermal camera works correctly and is able to detect people most of the time. We recorded all of these results to include in our final report.

  • Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

We are more or less done with the project and all that remains is further testing and recording of results.

  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

We hope to work on the final report in the next week.

Wenxin Xiao 

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week.

This week we spent a lot of time figuring out how to set up the maze we are showing for public demo. We assembled a test space that resembles the demo space we planned and tested our robot many times to ensure the navigation and thermal are working as expected.

  • Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

We essentially finished our project but we intend to test and record our results with more environments and iterations to provide a fuller discussion for final report.

  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

We hope to present in the public demo and finish the final report next week.

TEAM UPDATE

This week, we were able to significantly reduce computation time from 17s to 11s. We also mask some of the computation time by spawning a thread to rotate the robot at the same time. We also set up our final demo environment using cardboard boxes to test our robot before the public demo. Overall, the success rate of completion and human detection is something we are quite happy with.

Status Report 4/27

Aditya Ranade

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week.

This week, Akshat and I found the bug in frontier exploration which did not appear in simulation. The issue was the robot would sometimes execute an older trajectory instead of the current one. We found that this was due to a concurrency issue in which the path was beginning to execute right before the trajectory was received. Now, exploration works very robustly.

  • Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

We are on schedule currently. The thermal camera has been integrated into exploration and detects people in periodic intervals. Frontier exploration is also giving us good results with about 8/10 runs succeeding in testing.

  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

I plan on spending time next week to speed up our computation times so we can reduce the total time taken by the robot to cover the entire map.

Akshat Jain

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week.

This week, I helped Aditya fix the concurrency bug that we were facing last week which was due to the robot trying to execute a previous path before it received the complete trajectory. I also worked on the final presentation as well as getting data from testing to include in our slides.

  • Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

Frontier exploration has started working much better and executes correctly without collisions in our test areas most of the time. The robot gets quite slow when it is requesting a new path and we are hoping to reduce the computation time.

  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

We hope to reduce computation times as well as thoroughly test our thermal camera in multiple environments by the end of next week.

Wenxin Xiao 

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week.

This week I successfully integrated thermal camera to robot exploration with help from Aditya and Akshat. I also worked on the final presentation and tested the robot in apartment hallways and dining room with teammates. Due to the limited range in which thermal camera can successfully identify humans, we changed our algorithm so that the lidar rotates every few seconds to scan the surrounding area for human. The updated logic is that the thermal camera consistently checks for image temperature and once a block of image beyond preset threshold temperature was observed it signals the lidar. The lidar contains information of the obstacle observed and we can calculate the distance and angle of the person observed from the position of the robot and mark it on a map.

  • Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

We are currently on schedule. The concurrency issue causing the robot to execute old trajectories repeatedly was fixed and we successfully integrated thermal camera into robot exploration.

  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

We hope to test our thermal camera thoroughly in multiple environments by the end of next week. If time permits, we hope to speed up computation times and retest on multiple environments.

TEAM UPDATE

This week, we fully integrated human detection and frontier exploration subsystems. The robot periodically rotates during exploration to scan for humans in its vicinity. We use LIDAR data along with the thermal camera reading to interpolate where a human is located. The equations can be found in our presentation.

We also worked on testing both systems in the corridor of our apartment building and a portion of our apartment. We recorded preliminary test results for the final presentation.

Status Report 04/20

Name: Wenxin Xiao

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week.
    • Over this week, I worked to experiment on the temperature and angle threshold that would work best with the lidar. The thermal camera can now communicate with the lidar to obtain distance information on the obstacle observed and return to lidar when it flags a heat signature with help from Aditya and Akshat.
  • Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
    • Our progress is slightly behind. We will work extra hours to catch up to the project and ensure we have the integration of the project and record many testing scenarios.
  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
  • We aim to test on the thermal part of the project to ensure that it is identifying humans correctly and marking on the correct locations on gmap. We will mostly focus on testing the navigation, mapping, and human identification on multiple scenarios multiple times.

Name: Akshat Jain

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week.
  • This week, I mostly helped Wenxin and Aditya set up the thermal camera so it can corresponding distance information from the Lidar as soon as the thermal camera flags a person. I also worked with Aditya to fix a bug we had our robot when it would try to move back while executing a trajectory. We tested our robot in Hammerschlag to fix this problem.
  • Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
    • Our progress is behind as we were hoping to get the path planning working in time for the demo. We will mostly be working on this to fix the bug.
  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
    • We aim to fix this bug by the begining of next week. We also hope to extensively test the thermal camera and its ability to place a human on the map and its accuracy in doing so.

Aditya Ranade

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week.

This week, we were primarily focused on getting the thermal camera set up for the final demo. I specifically worked on getting range data from the lidar offset whenever the thermal camera detects a person. I also worked on testing frontier exploration in the HH hallway and there appears to be an issue regarding execution of the planned path. The robot sometimes did not follow the path and moved backwards instead. I will work on fixing this issue in the first half of next week for the final demo.

  • Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
    • I would have liked to have frontier exploration working decently well; however, the issue mentioned above still persists. I don’t have much other work this week, so I will work on fixing this bug at the soonest.
  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
    • Fix the bug in frontier exploration
    • Integrate thermal camera with exploration.

TEAM UPDATE

This week, we got made progress on the human detection subsystem. We attached the thermal camera to our mount and ensured that it is flush with the lidar 0th degree. We determined thresholds for human detection and the thermal camera is able to detect people within a range of 1.5-2m. Overall, we are behind schedule since we did not anticipate this bug which is causing exploration to fail at times. We plan on devoting more time towards our project this week to fix the bug and fully integrate the thermal camera into our exploration.

Weekly Status Report 4/14

Name : Akshat Jain

This week I worked on 3D printing the stand for the Raspberry Pi, Power Bank Thermal Camera as well as the Lidar sensor. We assembled the 3D print and attached all of the parts to the iRobot. In addition to this, we worked on creating an appropriate transformation for the iRobot along with our stand so that it works in simulation. We also started initial real world testing in basic rooms. One problem we are facing is that the Local network created by our laptops is not powerful enough to communicate with the robot. We plan to use a router to create a much more powerful local network to fix this problem.

Weekly Status Report 04/13

Name: Wenxin Xiao

Team Members: Aditya Ranade, Akshat Jain

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week.
    • Over this week, I worked on the code for the nodes that allow thermal to communicate with lidar to obtain distance information and publish the location of detected objects. The frame and the legs to uphold lidar got 3D printed. The team mostly focused on connecting to hardware components and move from simulation to actual mapping.
  • Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
    • Our progress is slightly behind. We will work extra hours to catch up to the project and ensure we have deliverables by demo next week.
  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
  • Next week we will mostly work to test our autonomous mapping and obstacle avoidance with our test scenarios and then move on and move on to thermal. Since a frame is not given in the specification, I will perform real tests to approximate the frame in order to obtain the angle of the object detected and connect thermal to other parts. We will then move on to test thermal detection with later test scenarios.

 

Name: Aditya Ranade

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week.
    • I worked on testing frontier exploration in hardware and real-world environments. At first, the code was running really slowly, so we made some optimizations regarding the map size and added threads to make some actions concurrent. We saw decent results as the robot was able to navigate to unknown spaces. We will continue working on tweaking our code to improve results.
  • Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
    • Our progress is on schedule. We will be working on human detection using the thermal camera this week.
  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
    • We will test the frontier exploration subsystem in more real-world settings. I will work on improving the speed and correctness of this subsystem.

Team Report

This week we 3D printed our frame to hold the lidar and other parts on the iRobot. We worked to assemble the robot and run frontier exploration and gmapping on it.

Next week we will start real world testing with our frontier exploration and mapping with various test cases. We will also mostly focus on the thermal part of the project, debugging and modifying the algorithm to ensure it works in real life, and start real world testing with our thermal detection with various test cases.

Weekly Status Report 04/06

Name: Wenxin Xiao

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week.
    • Over this week, I modified the code for human detection and investigated methods of creating a node for thermal to communicate with other parts of the design as no available package was found on the thermal camera we purchased.
  • Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
    • Our progress is on schedule. We have each part working separately in simulation and will start integrating the components together.
  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
  • Next week we will mostly work together to try to move from simulation to the real robot chassis. The board should be 3D printed and placed on the robot and so should all other parts. The frontier exploration and thermal camera need to move from simulation to real world testing.

 

Name: Aditya Ranade

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week.
    • Over this week, I fixed the obstacle avoidance code, which was an issue in the mid-semester demo. I increased the obstacle detection threshold and also increased the size of obstacles by changing the values of cells adjacent to obstacles to being an obstacle itself. The preliminary results have so far been good as the robot does not collide into walls or other obstacles.
  • Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
    • We are on schedule for the frontier exploration and hardware implementation. We need to catch up on human detection. We will be spending most of the next two weeks on this problem.
  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
    • We will print the 3D mount for the lidar, thermal camera, RPi and battery pack. We will assemble the robot and test our code in real world scenarios.

Name: Akshat Jain

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week.
    • Over this week, I fixed some issues we were facing during the mid-semester demo with the simulation. I updated the lowest cost path heuristic to add a cost to all cells on the grid adjacent to obstacles. Our robot now turned farther away from the obstacles than it initially was. I also set up the LIDAR with ROS so that it could start sending point cloud data to our frontier exploration subsystem.
  • Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
    • We are mostly on schedule for individual subsystems. We will be combining all of them together in the upcoming weeks.
  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
    • We hope to have the 3D mount for all the hardware components printed so we can start  real world testing.

Team Report:

Overall, we have made very good progress on autonomous exploration using the heuristic of finding frontiers and moving to the cluster with the greatest mass in order to increase the amount of new information we get about our environment. The next step is to test this on the iRobot Create using the Lidar sensor. We expect no significant issues to arise when testing this in hardware.

On the human detection front, we are slightly behind since we require the robot to be setup. As a result, the first priority is 3d printing the mount and assembling the robot to allow for quick real-world experimentation.

Weekly Report 03/30

Name: Wenxin Xiao

Team Members: Aditya Ranade, Akshat Jain

  • What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week.
    • Over this week, I mostly focused on moving from simulated data to actual testing of the code for human identification. I worked on the wiring and connection between raspberry pi and thermal camera, configured the raspberry pi to allow my code to be run, and initialized i2c connection with the sensor with Akshat. The thermal camera now outputs 8×8 thermal information correctly and I further interpolated it to allow for 32×32 thermal information.
  • Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
    • Our progress is on schedule. We have a working frontier exploration, a working obstacle avoidance, and a working thermal image output that identified heat signature separately as planned for the demo.
  • What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
  • I plan to modify the code to reduce false positives and false negatives since the working thermal output indicate that human thermal signatures are not in high thirties degree celsius but rather low twenties, close to no human presence. I further plan to write the publisher and subscriber node to connect thermal cameral outputs to the ros network.

 

https://github.com/adafruit/circuitpython

https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruits-raspberry-pi-lesson-4-gpio-setup/configuring-i2c

https://www.mouser.com/datasheet/2/737/adafruit-amg8833-8×8-thermal-camera-sensor-1396559.pdf

Weekly Status Report

Name : Akshat Jain

This week we received most of the hardware components so we started work on setting up each one of them. I set up the LIDAR and connected it to the Raspberry Pi with a serial cable. I was then able receive point cloud data from it. One issue we had was that the point cloud data from the LIDAR did not give one point per degree which it claimed to give originally. We are currently trying to find a fix to this problem.

This week we finally received the iRobot Create 2 as well. I set up the libraries on the Raspberry Pi as well as the lab computer for robot control. We can now give commands to the robot to move with a specific speed and turn specific angles.

I also helped Wenxin set up the Thermal camera and set up libraries for it on the Raspberry Pi. We were able to receive an 8×8 grid of temperature values which would successfully give us a higher reading when we put our hand in front of it.

Status Report 03/30

Aditya Ranade

This week I worked on writing code for frontier exploration. I have working code for detecting frontier cells – which are cells at the boundary of unknown and empty regions of the map. It is often the case that frontiers lie in clusters, as a result, we find the center of the cluster and make the robot navigate to it. Now that we have found frontiers, we are working on a path planning and obstacle avoidance algorithm so that the robot can explore autonomously.

Although we got a significant portion of frontier exploration working, I was hoping to also finish path planning. However, I was extremely busy with Greek Sing and other assignments this week.

Over this weekend and the beginning of next week, I will wrap up path planning and have a working frontier exploration subsystem.

Team Report

This week we finally received our iRobot Create 2. We were able to send it velocity commands and get it to move and rotate. We will be 3D printing a frame to mount on the robot to accommodate our LIDAR, thermal camera, and RPi. We also made a lot of progress on frontier exploration.

For the demo next week, we plan to show a working version of our frontier exploration subsystem in simulation. We will also show that we can extract range data from the lidar as well as thermal camera images. After the demo, our goal is to integrate all these components and move from simulation to hardware testing.