This week was very important for our team as it was around the 2-week mark before the final deadline. So, we followed a daily work plan for this week.
Ishita Sinha and Ishita Kumar finished the final set-up for the conveyor belt, including positioning its height and stitching the belt in place. Kush integrated the code onto the Jetson Nano. Then, IK and IS did several conveyor belt + software runs. Initially, the algorithm was too slow to meet our conveyor belt speed requirements. However, IS sped up the code from 3s/fruit to 0.04s/fruit by switching to Numpy arrays. So, now we meet our speed requirements. Some frame analyzer bugs were also fixed and the software+conveyor belt system works well for the most part. We found that sometimes, the hsv filter masks the rottenness detector uses picks up a lot of unrelated noise due to bad lighting conditions. So, it is very important for us to obtain better lighting for more consistently successful runs of our system.
The final part of the MPV left is the gate. Kush and IK designed the first prototype of the gate based on our original design. Unfortunately, the gate from the original design is too short and the banana just gets stuck and starts rotating on the conveyor belt. However, we came up with several new prototypes and have CADed a longer version of our gate which we hope will work.
Having the strict plan for this week helped but we strayed from the plan by mid-week due to unexpected bugs and our original gate design not working. However, we learnt many important things about our design this week during integration and will continue to follow strict plans for the next weeks to finish up our original MVP design (including the gate) with the addition of the conveyor belt.
