This week I focused on doing more research about the mechanics of the vehicle. During my research I was able to finalize two potential motor driver design which we will filter down to one by the end of next week. In addition to this, I also started working on a CAD model for the vehicle. We found the we may end up being pressed for space on a traditional RC Kit size so we opted to create our own slightly larger design. Lastly I began testing some of the hardware we plan on using to drive the motors. An interesting find is that there is a 2v drop with the motor controllers which we may have to compensate for to get the speeds we are looking for. This will require some research about how best to go about power delivery for all the vehicle systems.
Team’s Update for 02/20/2021
This week the team focused on getting the details of the project finalized. This included discussions with our assigned TA and professor to evaluate the state of our ideas. The meeting concluded with our team settling on the task of a convoy system to demonstrate as a use case for V2V communication. The rest of the week was spent on researching some of the core technologies we intended to use for our project. Some of these insights led us to settle on technologies for communication and perception. We also spent time preparing the our planned schedule for the rest of the semester. This lead us to decide on tasks for each of us to complete which are outlined in greater detail in our proposal documentation.
In the next coming week, the team will be focused on getting the necessary materials finalized according to our budget constraint. This will include our design decision regarding the mechanics of the RC cars. We would also like to setup team infrastructure such as git hub so we can better manage and coordinate our tasks.
Joel’s Status Update for 02/20/2021
This week I mostly focused on finalizing core project details with the rest of my teammates. We met with our assigned TA and Professor to help reshape the scope of our project. After feedback from these meetings our team settled on the task that we would attempt to perform with the vehicle. Another thing that I looked into this week was the use of WiFi direct connections for our communication protocol. This research revealed that the technology would be quite a hassle to get correct and not critical in enabling the functionality we require for our application. This lead us to the decision to use Bluetooth for our communication.
Looking forward, I want to focus on getting the required components finalized for the mechanics of the vehicle by the end of this coming week.