The beginning of the week was spent deciding how to rework our project to something feasible that we would be able to deliver at the end of the semester. The group and I spent an initial meeting discussing what changes we are going to make: what to cut out, what to add, and what concerns we had. I then took this bullet point list and wrote out the full statement of work. Since we decided to add more to the…
This week, the team focused on refactoring the project to meet the project goals with the coronovirus quarantines in place, and each member working remotely. Aditi is the only once in Pittsburgh. We had a few zoom meetings to discuss the future trajectory of the project. We came up with the following concerns over out original project – – All parts located in Pittsburgh while most of the team is not. – Not able to test on original test cases….
This week, I worked with the team to refactor the project in order to meet or our goals. We are in different locations, and I am the only one in Pittsburgh. Therefore, I would be the only one having access to the robot hardware. Keeping this in mind, we decided to make the following changes: – We want to limit robot assembly and in person testing. To do this, we removed the CV portion of the project. This includes door…
This week, aside from meetings with my team and refactoring the project and the statement of work, I personally primarily worked on getting the Server component up and running. We requested AWS credits which I used to provision an EC2 instance, associated with a file backend also hosted by AWS. I set up my SSH access to the machine, and also a GitHub repo which will be used to store our work and deploy to the server. I did some…
For the OCR algorithm, I got Tesseract set up and working on input image files. I also wrote a python script to start taking input from the Raspberry Pi Camera and process optical character recognition, but haven’t been able to test it. The process to download Tesseract and OpenCV onto the Raspberry Pi took longer than expected, but we finally got it. I also came up with a general navigation planning flow using a Global and Local SLAM subsystem modeled…
At the beginning of the week I really thought we were behind, especially because we spent the last week prioritizing the design document and presentation. However, our team benefited from work sessions outside of designated course time on Friday and the weekend. By Wednesday, we had received all our parts and collected design feedback from the presentations. As a result of the design feedback, we made two major design changes to the project: Add ultrasonic sensors to be able to…
This week, I gave a presentation on the design of our project. Later during the weekend, I helped the rest of the team create the design report document as well as set up the Roomba iCreate and the the raspberry Pi. We decided that we would add more ultrasonic sensors to the robot to help it avoid bumping into obstacles like tables. I created the following diagram that illustrates this (and added it to the document): I also updated parts…
Currently the single largest risk remains in the processing power requirement. We looked into Google Cartographer, which recommends 16GB RAM, but other projects have run Cartographer on embedded systems by using only 2D data like we are. We also plan to use ROS-provided SLAM libraries to do the fine-grain computations. The only significant change made to our design was the inclusion of two more ultrasound sensors, facing forward and angled up/down. These are intended to address the concern of low…
This week, I flashed Raspbian onto our microSD and got the Pi up and running. In work sessions with Aditi and Shanel, we fleshed out the Design Report, set up Roomba interfacing and control, configured the Pi’s network connection, and installed ROS. We are on track. Work has begun on every component except the server stack, and the design report is basically done. Next week, we hope to set up the Roomba-Pi interface and execute autonomous programs. We will also…
This week we were able to pick up parts and begin testing out the RPLidar A1. I also continued working on the design report. Because of the discussion on Monday, we missed time to work on our project during the allocated course time. I think we will have to start working more hours on our own outside of the official class times. This means we’ll have to strategically plan syncs and checkpoints for the time we have together