This week, I spent most of my time working with the team to set up various components for integration. We aimed to get the drone flying with at least video recording, but various unexpected issues popped up.
Our raspberry pi 4 suddenly broke, so we were unable to get the drone flying with the video recording. Only today(4/10) were were able to borrow a new one, and with this I was able to calibrate the extrinsic and intrinsic matrices for our camera opencv and a chessboard printout. At the same time, I helped Vedant set up ROS video streaming from the raspberry pi to the jetson tx1. I also spent a long time with Sid trying to connect our lidar laser sensor and px4flow optical flow camera. Unfortunately we had issues compiling the firmware on our version 1 pixhawk flight controller given its limited 1MB flash.
This upcoming week, I will focus on making sure our drone is up in the air. This involves solidifying our flight sequence from manual position control to autonomous mode and hammering out other weird bugs. Otherwise, basic autonomy involves flying up to the specific height and turning in a specific direction. This upcoming week will be extremely busy with other projects and exams, so the full motion planning may not be finished yet.