Tomas’s Status Report for 2/12/22

What did you personally accomplish this week on the project?

Our group’s focus for this week was to do the initial setup for the project. I personally contributed to this goal by researching what we need to accomplish to get the CV side of things up and running:

• I researched how to perform initial setup on the Jetson Xavier AGX.
  • I went to the lab today (Saturday) to perform this setup, but I discovered that a host computer running Ubuntu is required. Since none of the Linux machines in the lab run Ubuntu, I will dual boot one of my computers at home tonight and try again on Sunday.
• I researched how the Jetson JetPack SDK can be used to run the YOLO object detection algorithm. Some notable observations include:
  • NVIDIA provides pertained models for various CV deep learning algorithms (YOLO included) through the TAO Toolkit
  • NVIDIA recommends using the DeepStream SDK (running on top of JetPack) to run AI-Powered applications. I have seen forum posts and articles commenting on the performance of this configuration, and it appears that we will be able to meet our frame rate metric with it.
• I researched video cameras that we may use for video input. I determined that a webcam running over USB will be sufficient for our application, and that chipsets running at higher resolutions over different protocols won’t be necessary. I suggested that we start off with development using a USB 2.0 webcam that I already own, and if it appears that we will need more bandwidth, we can order a USB 3.0 camera (e.g. something like this one on Amazon).

Is your progress on schedule or behind?

• Since I had hoped to have the Jetson board setup by the end of today, my progress is slightly behind. Fortunately, the reason for delay will be easy to fix (see above), and I plan to get the setup done tomorrow.

What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

• Next week my team and I will be working on developing our design review presentation. To that end, I hope to complete my portion of the slides (to be determined).
• As mentioned, I hope to have the Jetson initial setup done by early next week, and I would like to start learning and experimenting with the SDKs mentioned above. I hope to have a very simple (“hello world”-style) program built using the SDKs as part of my learning process. If I manage to do this next week, we will be ahead of schedule by at least a week.