This week was a bit hectic for me so I did not accomplish as much as I had originally hoped. I was expecting to have tested basic Bluetooth communication between 2 different devices, but I currently just have boilerplate code setup. Fortunately, most of our hardware has arrived so next week we can all work on our physical cars. I will continue to establish Bluetooth connection between 2 devices and once we have our RC cars moving, we can think about how to send instructions from the lead car to the trailing cars.
Team Update for 03/06/2021
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.).
Fausto’s Status Update [03-06-2021]
This week, I read up on Bluetooth technology so that next week I can begin programming communication between Bluetooth devices. I mainly read a pdf I found by MIT on Bluetooth programming (https://people.csail.mit.edu/rudolph/Teaching/Articles/BTBook.pdf) which contained a lot of interesting details about how Bluetooth works and some intricacies with the technology. This pdf details how to create sockets such that data can be transmitted and includes information on piconets (which are ad hoc networks consisting of 8 devices, where one acts as a master, and the others act as slaves). One thing I didn’t know about Bluetooth is that an actively communicating Bluetooth device changes channels every 625 microseconds, so devices within a system have to sync their channel changes (I am sure Bluetooth hardware handles this but it was interesting to learn about). Next steps are: setting up basic communications between Bluetooth devices, getting a better idea of what information we want to transmit across our RC cars.
Fausto’s Status Update [02-27-2021]
At the beginning of this week, I practiced and presented our group’s Proposal Presentation. It went well and gave our group some ideas to think about and some timeline reconsiderations we could make. The biggest critique we received was in regard to the object detection using lidar so we will most likely be drifting away from that idea to a more manageable alternative. Additionally, we realized we needed to make our goals more quantitative. I researched methods of setting up a bluetooth ad hoc network and will continue to research and settle on an implementation next week.
Fausto’s Status Update [02-20-2021]
This week, my teammates and I worked on consolidating our ideas and goals for our project by narrowing down various different design options. After researching different forms of communication, we decided the best choice for communicating between RC cars was Bluetooth. Bluetooth works well for our purposes because it has good range, can be used for ad hoc networking and is simpler than some of the other options we were looking at (wifi). We are still deciding how much communication we want our cars to do and are exploring the idea of cars communicating at intersections for faster transportation (which car slows down, which one speeds up). Next week, we want to finalize the hardware components we will be using for our RC cars and more clearly define communication guidelines.