Sebastian’s Status Report for 4/10/2021

Accomplishments
- Created a test of both the robot state machine and ground station order planner running on their respective machines. Fixed minor bugs revealed by the test.
- Finished setting up ssh keys on our machines for the Xavier and disabled password authentication. The Xavier is now much less likely to get hacked.
- Worked in the lab with my team to finish setting up the robot for the midterm demo, which involved taking various mechanical measurements to define coordinate transforms, as well as testing the robot in various places on campus to profile the SLAM performance.
- Worked in the lab with my team to begin integration of the IMU and GPS to the localization code.
Progress Timeline
- Our progress is on schedule
Next Week Deliverables
- Begin integrating the robot planning code with the higher-level robot state machine to allow the ground station to send orders to the robot planner.
- Attempt to switch from RTABMAP to ORBSLAM2 for faster mapping (RTABMAP loses tracking well below our desired speeds). If this does not improve SLAM performance, then we will be doing SLAM without vision (still using IMU, wheel encoders, and GPS).
- Write the robot heartbeat node to aid in the debugging of integration tasks.
Progress Pictures/Videos
- The robot driving up a steep slope on campus
  - Localization was not functional for this trial. We were testing different speeds and soon after this trial found that the chosen speed was too fast for RTABMAP