This week our main focus was on familiarizing ourself with the components. I did some research on the compatibility and specs of the Create 1 model that was available, and concluded that it was not going to be suited for our project, and that we should instead buy a Create 2. The Raspberry Pi we borrowed required some peripherals, but also some setup. For the OS, I would’ve preferred to use Ubuntu Mate, as it is relatively lightweight and very…
This week we focused mainly on starting to test our parts and deciding logistics of our work schedule. We discovered that the roomba available for borrow was a Create 1, made in 2007. In addition to the specs being subpar, there is also little documentation available online for that model. Most supported projects, datasheets, and discussions online are using the Create 2. Therefore, we returned the roomba and requested a purchase of the Create 2. The RPLIDAR is great and…
This week we received the components, including the Roomba, the Rapsberry Pi, the lidar and the camera module. The RPI did not come with an SD card, so we had to find one and install the OS onto it. I managed to get one from ideate, and we placed an order for an SD card. Additionally, we discovered that we received a Roomba 1, which was released in 2007 has far less documentation and support than the Roomba 2. We…
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…
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…
We started our week by reflecting on the proposal presentation and feedback. It was clear to us that we need to refine our requirements based off of the target user experience, rather than the specs of each individual component. There was also some confusion over the scope of the project, so we’ll need to make this clearer next time in the design presentation. After the first proposal presentation, our group had some concerns about the processing power needed to run SLAM,…
I spent most of my time this week working on the design report and presentation. After looking through some reports from previous semesters, I created a rough outline in which the team and divide and flesh out each of our respective focus areas. I researched some previous projects using Tesseract, an open source OCR (optical character recognition) program. Although this program is widely support and has seen pretty good success with reading text from signs and paper, I am a…
Alex Bai (albai) presented the project proposal on February 5, 2020. Here is a link to download the slides he presented: Proposal Presentation
Google Maps lacks accurate and comprehensive indoor positioning information. Businesses and establishments that upload their own floor plans are able to show specific details on indoor locations. However, most buildings do not have this information available online, making it difficult for visitors to navigate indoors. The Robotic Indoor Plotting project will autonomously generate indoor floor plans, while labeling room descriptors and dimensions. When placed indoors, the robot will explore the space, creating a 2D map using built-in obstacle detection…