This week, our team has made great progress in narrowing down technical design choices for our project. Last week we decided to replace the LIDAR sensor on our lead car with a PS4 camera to simplify the object detection and this week, our team acquired the camera and will soon set it up, such that it can be used on our RC car. Additionally, in regards to the hardware for our RC cars, the CAD work for our car has just about been finished so we will be able to construct the car soon. We have also decided how the motor system will be setup for the car turning mechanism; we will use two LN298 H bridges to control the front and rear motor pair which will hopefully give us the agility in turning that we want.
We will be constructing up to 3 cars (the lead car being equipped with a camera for object detection). The lead car plays a huge role in our project so we will begin working on object detection as soon as possible. This week we read up on a R-CNN algorithm that uses RGB-D information for state of the art object detection, so we will experiment with that. This means we will want to setup the PS4 camera next week to see what we’re working with.
This week consisted of a lot of research for our team, and served as an awesome week for feeling out the scope of our project and getting more comfortable with the technologies we will be working on. We worked hard to come up with metrics we want to hit for our project and worked on the upcoming presentation. As we lay the groundwork for our project, we will also start thinking more deeply on tunable/modifiable design choices (for example, what type of information to send between cars: raw data, instructions, etc.).