This week, we spent a lot of time working together and integrating the system. All our work was done together over zoom calls. We hit several milestones –

– We integrating the two main parts of the project we were working on thus far. I pulled in the navigation/path planning code that Shanel and Alex had, and we merged it with the roomba movement/slam code I had on the raspberry pi.
– We met the milestone of getting the slam algorithm to work very well, generating coherent maps every time. We did this by fixing a long standing bug where the SLAM update function would take in [dxy (distance), dr (rotations), dt] instead of [dxy/dt, dr/dt , dt] which we were feeding it.
– We added several additional features and optimizations to the navigation.We can now detect when the algorithm is done through a flood fill in the map, and we fixed a critical bug in the A* search that made it return bad paths.

Although we’ve made a lot of progress, I am a little concerned about making final optimizations so it matches specs for our final demo, as the robot’s path planning is a little chaotic right now.

Next week, we will add optimizations as well as finish up on the webapp.