This Week

I accomplished the following tasks this week:

• A lot of my time this week was spent designing the block diagram for our project with Shanel. This involved figuring out the connections between each of the main components – Raspberry Pi, Lidar, Power Bank, Roomba (iCreate 2), and raspberry camera module.
  • I discovered that the raspberry Pi contained a special pins for raspberry camera module.
• I worked on miscellaneous parts of the Design Presentation. We decided that I would eventually present this.
• The rest of the team and I decided that we should record meeting minutes to to use as the content for upcoming blog posts
• We decided to use a Lidar instead of an Intel real-sense or a Kinect. I proposed that the Lidar be attached at a height of ~2m so that it would not be obstructed by any small obstacles on the ground.
• I did some research on projects that were similar to ours. I found google Cartographer (https://google-cartographer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) which essentially does what our project is trying to accomplish – a robot uses SLAM to generate a floor-plan. I think their open source code could be a great asset for us.
• Based on this feedback, I made a mockup of what the robot would look like on illustrator:
  

  View post on imgur.com

• I suggested we used C++ for faster software. However, we decided that speed wasn’t going to be too much of a problem, so we want to use python at least to start of with.
• We also finalized on having two outlets to charge the robot – one for the roomba, another for the raspberry pi. Having two different ports might be mildly inconvenient for a user, but power is not the main issue we are trying to solve.

Next Week

I have the following tasks planned for next week:

• We have ordered the parts, so we will start testing each component. We might also want to stress-test the raspberry Pi, to see how much computation it can handle.
• We have a rough draft of the block diagram, which we will complete next week.
• We definitely need to do more research on the LSLAM (Lidar SLAM) algorithm and path planning, so I want to look into this next week.
•  We will complete making the presentation, and I want to practice delivering it before the presentation.