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Alvin’s Status Report 4/3/21

This past week, I worked on adapting the flight start up sequence and full pipeline to work with the real physical drone and not just the simulator. This included working with Sid to approximate the true transform from the drone’s frame to the camera frame on our real system using Solidworks.

I also worked on an initial implementation for using Model Predictive Control (MPC) to track the target’s predicted trajectory using existing code from another project. I realized that simply following the target and imposing distance constraints in the numerical solver would not achieve our desired results, since we really want the drone to always be facing the target. This means for every predicted future position of the target, we need to project this backwards to the optimal pose of the drone, since the drone’s camera is fixed. This will be a focus of next week.

Lastly, I worked with Sid to mount all the physical components on the drone. We tried doing a test flight this week, but realized that we had several key steps to finish before and made a list of task assignments to complete with a strict deadline of testing full flight this upcoming Friday. As a result, this task list is our primary objective so we can get the drone flying on Friday.

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Vedant’s Status Report 4/3/21

This week I worked on making the button circuit which will be used to start/stop flight and start/stop video streaming/recording:

I also worked on the RPi camera. I tried implementing the 12MP camera  with the Pi 4 but that did not work either so we have decided to use a 5MP camera Alvin had from a previous project. Here is a sample image from the camera:

I wrote a script to save the video to SD card as we plan on verifying some of our requirements on the recorded video. I also wrote a script to start/stop the video capture with switches as it will be easy to do that than have a computer and keyboard/mouse every time we want to start/stop flying.

The ROS connection on the Pi was not working and I am in the process of understanding why this is the case. There is a “connection” being made but using turtlesim, when pressing the keyboard arrows, the turtle does not move.

 

I am still on schedule. By next week, I want to resolve the ROS bug and get the Pi and TX1 communicating. I want to be able to stream the video captured on camera connected to Pi and feed it into my object detection code on the TX1. Finally, I hope to write code to integrate the switches I have prototyped with the TX1 so a start/stop signal is recognized. I spend too much time trying to make the 12 MP camera work, so I intend to spent more time this week to finish these goals so hopefully we can fly by end of next week.