This week, we met with Professor Tamal and Joe over Zoom to discuss our change in plans. Our team members will be scattered in different places: Alex will be in Connecticut, Chakara will be in Bangkok, and Jeremy will likely return to Toronto once circumstances allow. This means that our project must be able to be completed remotely, which would void any hardware or physical requirement for our project. After the Zoom meeting, Joe brought up a fantastic idea to simulate the input data we would get from our laser setup – Jeremy will be exploring options for this since he will handle most things related to modeling and rendering for the project. Alex and Chakara will start to write code for handling the camera data and Alex will specifically be doing the math to convert 2D coordinates for the laser beam into 3D world coordinates to generate the point cloud with.
Currently, the main risk would be if we can or can not efficiently and accurately simulate or laser setup, more specifically, capturing the laser data and rotation angles. Jeremy has done a fair amount of research on this part and it seems likely that it is possible. If it does not, we can move back to using a RealSense camera to capture depth maps instead.
The main change to the system is as mentioned in the above paragraph. We are removing all hardware/physical components of the project and will be using simulated data that we will create from rendering 3D objects instead.
Below is the updated Gantt Chart with physical component related tasks removed.
Below is our Refocus SOW describing the steps we will take to refocus our project: