This week our team focused on perfecting and finalising the individual subsystems to make integration go smoother. Joel finalised and updated the actual vehicle specifications and characteristics, and amended the odometry functionality of the vehicles. Construction of the remaining vehicles will be completed at a later date once integration begins. Joel and Fausto have both begun porting their modules over to ROS and developing a broadcast system to make communication between the subnodes easier. Fausto also begun preparing the communication protocol and establishing limits as to how far the vehicles can be before connection breaks. He found that the connection is extremely robust to distance and once the cars establish a connection at the beginning they are highly unlikely to have that connection broken. Additionally, Fausto has also begun researching more about ROS and figuring out the best way of designing his module in order to have it seamlessly integrate on the ROS platform. This will eventually allow for a more fluid integration, as they can help integrate the object detection node into the ROS platform during next week. On the object detection front, Jeffrey began finalising the pipeline and integrating the Intel RealSense camera with object detection. Rather than using RGB-D image values, only RGB will be inputted to MobileNet v2, and the resulting bounding box with additional padding will be redrawn onto the depth map to extract the distance of the object from the car, and extrapolate what angle at which to turn the wheels in order to avoid the obstacle. The depth map wit the bounding box will also be broadcasted to the localisation node to further develop the map of the environment.
Looking ahead, we want to begin integration next week, and hopefully have an integrated product for interim demos. When integration inevitably runs into issues, our subsystems are ready to demo and are pretty much finalised. This makes integration our main priority, and we will also begin to further develop our communication protocol beginning next week.