Team Status Report [4/24/21]

This week our team focused on preparing our subcomponents so we could integrate them together properly. In regards to the vehicle mechanics, we switched from standard wheels to mecum wheels, which allows for the vehicle to more easily maneuver around the course and maintain more accurate localization information. Additionally, accommodations to the body of the car were made in order to support the camera being mounted on the vehicle. This week we ran into issues with running our object detection program on the Nvidia Jetson. We ran into an issue where the network we were using was too big and consuming too much power and memory, so the frame rate was too low for our usage. So we moved to a Tensor RT base for the neural network inference and switched to mobile net-v1 since it was too difficult getting v2 to load. This solved the issue and we are now steadily hitting around 30 FPS and no longer run into resource issues. Finally, throughout the week we focused on migrating our code into ROS and looking forward to next week, we will fully integrate our systems.