This Week

Most of my capstone time was spent doing research on the planned implementations of our components.

Specifically, I looked into using a rotating LIDAR as suggested by Tamal, especially its feasibility with an embedded system. One project I found was this one, where someone had used the exact model of sensor we were looking at (RPLidar A1M8) with a Raspberry Pi 3. They even provided their source code, which I’m sure will be very useful to us moving forward.

Additionally, I did a little research on SLAM and its modifications. Full active LSLAM is apparently very costly on embedded devices, especially since we plan to run door CV at the same time. If the processing is an insurmountable issue, we will move to OrthoSLAM, a version of SLAM designed specifically to run well with limited processing power. Alternatively, we could just do wall-hugging to establish a perimeter, then map it out from there.

 

Project Status

I would say our project is not particularly behind (I sure hope not at this early stage), but I feel that some aspects are not well-enough researched yet with regards to details. This is because we had several different changes along the way with the sensing system, although I’m fairly sure rotating lidar is exactly what we need. In an effort to address this, we made a rough plan that started with us requesting several parts from ECE last week, which we plan to start using to test and ramp up asap.

 

Next Week

Next week will be the “start” of the actual work. We will fully flesh out our component plans. With parts in hand, it will be much easier to do baseline testing to get concrete numbers. I hope for us to be fully up running with the framework for each of our parts (SDKs, special software, connection cables, establishing standards and a workspace) so that we can immediately start reading documentation and ramping up.