Team BC: AutoMapper

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 the identification of human presence with the thermal camera. I installed and set up CircuitPython and other libraries needed to support adafruit blinka but I2C needs to be enabled to test whether the code works and will depend on my teammates’ progress.

• 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 since the robot chassis we ordered on Amazon came with half the pieces and we have to return and reorder another one. We plan to have a working simulation on frontier exploration for the demo if the new robot we ordered this week does not come in time.

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

• We plan to have a working version of the frontier exploration with obstacle avoidance on simulation.

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, we mostly focused on filling the details of our design of the project for design presentation and design report. I worked on the metrics for testing and validating our results, the test environment we plan on using, the benchmarks we set for human detection, mapping coverage, and others. I also worked on the budget for the parts we decide to order, adding in an IMU, and updated our new timeline with more details on the design.

• 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 since we delayed ordering the parts until we met the TA on Thursday. We will order the robot chassis, IMU, and LIDAR the following Monday and plan to catch up on schedule by assembling them over spring break.

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

• We will order the parts the following Monday. I further plan to start working on the algorithm that deals with finding the frontiers of the grid map.

Akshat Jain

Over this week I worked on setting up the hardware interfaces for all the sensors on the Raspberry Pi. This involved setting up the virtual machine on Raspberry Pi and setting up SSH on it so that all team members can work on the Raspberry Pi remotely. It also involved opening up the I2C, SPI and serial ports of the Raspberry Pi. I also downloaded all the API’s needed for all the sensors so that all of them can work with Python. I also set up ROS on the Raspberry Pi.

I also worked on creating a more detailed diagram of the hardware subsystems for the Design Document. This involved finding the correct GPIO pins for the I2C, SPI and serial interfaces and figuring out the correct wiring as well as the exact placement of the lidar on the mobile wheeled robot. We also figured out a mechanism to rotate the robot so that the thermal camera can capture 360 degree information.

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 (12+ hours).

• • I installed and set up ROS Melodic and went through ROS Tutorials. The ROS was installed on Ubuntu 18.04, which was run on VirtualBox.
  • We further filled in the details of our proposed design in preparation of the design presentation next week and the execution of our design.

• 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 since we delayed ordering the parts because we want to meet with the TAs after we finish our detailed design of the project to ensure that the specifications provided by the parts we decided on is sufficient to fulfill the requirements. We plan on conducting simulations before we implement so delay ordering the parts should not affect our schedule.

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

• • We plan to meet with the TA and the professor with our detailed design to settle down on our purchases of the parts. I also plan to decide on the path planning algorithm for autonomous navigation and start the implementation of the motion planning for an unknown goal.