Progress
This week’s progress for me was mostly doing researches. Since the Roomba hasn’t arrived yet, I had enough time to give some thoughts to the implementation of the robot.
Path finding algorithm:
Since the goal is fixed throughout the path finding, and the environment is for the most part unchanged, Any-time search such as Anytime A*/D* won’t be necessary. Instead, we can incrementalize the C-space and perform some variation of a simple A* search. We will test different algorithms to see how much path-finding computation RPi can handle. If the computation takes too long, we can perhaps take advantage of the Xavier board.
Robot configuration:
We have previously found some SDK for mapping and Python wrapper library for Roomba Open Interface. These seem promising, but after some close examination of the Python wrapper library, I have some doubts about it working accurately as-is. We will begin testing these by implementing a simple motor controls.
Deliverables next week
Hopefully we will get the Roomba next week, then we will have opportunities to test our ideas on the actual robot. As of the moment, my goal next week is to:
1. Configure the Roomba with RPi
2. Import SDK/Libraries
3. Implement simple motor control (turning, moving back and forth)
Schedule
On Schedule.