Author: fhz500

This week was mostly focused on getting things ready for the end of the semester. I mostly worked on refining and building the final presentation that was given on Wednesday. I believe it went well and I felt like we were able to showcase all the things we wanted to discuss with the professors and to the class as a whole. Besides that, I also worked on the poster and designing that for the demo next week. Lastly, we did some testing and bought some materials to move towards mobility of the system.

We are on schedule and hope to finish everything up as time is winding down!

We hope to complete the final report, make the system mobile and do automobile testing this past week.

This past week, there was clear significant progress made within our group, hitting near our MVP.  Regarding the work that I did over the past week, there was a quite a few.  The first being that me and chad worked together to scour through the YOLO code and were able to successfully print out and grab the coordinates of the bounding boxes that were being drawn per frame.  From here, we integrated both the lidar with the single Jetson as we found it did not create that much latency. With both components together, we needed to send over the coordinates to the Lidar script. We tried to make a ROS publisher node in the YOLO script but the paths of the dependencies were really messed up and convoluted. So, I wrote a function inside YOLO that constantly writes to a file that coordinates of bounding boxes in the most recent frame. Then, I wrote a ROS publisher node that took the coordinates from the script and published to the topic that Ethan’s node was subscribed to. From there, everything kind of came together!

With this done, we are basically on track with our schedule and all is left is testing, flushing out the range of our program, and physical components.

Next week, I hope to print out rest of acrylic  for design, test the system more with cars and people, and change the range of the system.

Here is the link to a video of a base showing of our system: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uesYUynypOKnusUUs-6F8mhb_bZTSKB7/view?usp=sharing

This past week I helped two main things. The first being helping Ethan with the Lidar. We were able to use the TimeSynchronizer package that synchronizes incoming channels by the timestamps contained in their headers to allow for clear data input from both the Lidar and the camera at the same time. We used this website as a reference (http://wiki.ros.org/message_filters) .

The second thing that I worked on was finally working on the physical design aspect of the system. I thought this would be done the best through using SolidWorks and using 3d printing. After measuring the length, width, and height of all the components, I sketched a 6x5x6.5 inch box with shelves to hold the components. Below is a picture. 

After submitting the design, though, I was told that the printing failed and the design was too big. From here, I decided to pivot to acrylic and wood design and put the pieces together.

Now that Chad got the camera working, I feel a bit better and believe that we are on schedule. In the next week, I hope to make the physical components with the acrylic, have the Jetsons talking to another (if Chad’s work allows for it), and start prepping for the final presentation.

There was two main things done on my end this week. The first was prepping and setting up for the ethics discussion by going over the assigned questions and the work assigned to us. Mostly though, I worked on setting up the other Jetson that is to be used for testing. I made sure to flash the same image as well as install all the same packages on this device that the other device also had.

We are still on schedule and hope to even move faster now that we have two jetsons that each device can work on.

In the next week, I hope the Lidar is fully setup and we can start the integration of both the Lidar and camera together.

This week of the project consisted mostly of me getting the Jetson to work. After receiving the Jetson, I tried flashing the OS on to the Jetson but when in boot mode, it would stay on the Nvidia Logo.  After looking at this website for guidance, https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/jetson-nano-2gb-stuck-on-boot-screen-with-nvidia-logo/169601 , I found out that there is a separate image that I have to flash (https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/jetpack). Once loaded, there was another issue that I ran into. In order to download the necessary packages for the camera and the Lidar, internet is needed. This was an issue as there is only wired internet on the Jetson and the network did not recognize the device. After many painful hours of trying to figure out the issue, and talking to 3 different professors, we recognized to register the MAC address on the CMU website. After an hour or so, the device was connected.

From here, we installed the camera packages on the Jetson using this guide https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHvb225Pw1s&ab_channel=JetsonHacks . We attached the camera and were able to run some initial tests. Below is a picture of the initial setup.

Our project is on schedule and I intend to help Ethan with the Lidar setup next week. In the next week I hope the Lidar is setup and there is a comprehensive environment such that we can take in readings from the Lidar and show them on the Jetson.