For this week, we did a majority of the work as a team. After getting feedback from the Proposal Presentation, we realized that our user-story was too vague and that some of our requirements were not as clear and quantifiable as they could be. As a team, after doing more research, we narrowed down the scope of our use-case to just archaeological documentation and refine our requirements to fit our use-case more. For example, we made the error rate for accuracy depends on the object size dynamically instead of just static measurements. We redefined our usability requirement to include the input object size and weight limit and redefined our time requirement to be one minute. We also refined some other requirements. As a team, we also discussed different sensors we researched on to use for the project.
Currently, the most significant risk we have right now is that we have not finalized the type of sensor to use yet, so we might be a little behind the schedule in terms of ordering parts. We are managing this risk by starting other tasks that could be done in parallel such as researching more on the common pipeline generally utilized in 3D Mesh reconstruction from raw depth data. We also assigned everyone on the team to do more research on different sensors available. We first agreed on using Intel real-sense depth camera (RGB-D camera using coded light), but was suggested by Professor Mukherjee to look into 1D/2D laser array/LIDAR sensor which could be more accurate and time-efficient. All of our team members are working on this to be able to finalize the sensor by this upcoming week and get back on schedule. Another risk factor we have is our lack of expertise in mechanical engineering and robotics. The rotational mechanism and platform design seem to be more complex than what we initially thought. The rotational mechanism is a crucial part of our system no matter which type of sensor we use. This risk is being managed by letting Chakara take care of the part and he only has to worry about this part for the upcoming week. We also started seeking advice from someone with more expertise in the area.
As mentioned earlier, there were some changes made to the requirements and use-case. The changes were necessary for us to be able to narrow down the project scope to be able to finish it in the given period of time. They were also necessary since we need requirements that are more clear and quantifiable to use them as metrics. These changes cost us time from last week but made our project goals and scope clearer which will benefit us in the future.
Below is the link to our updated schedule. Or you could also refer to our “Project Schedule” section.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1GGzn30sgRvBdlpad1TIZRK-Fq__RTBgIKN7kDVB3IlI/edit?usp=sharing