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.