Team Status Report for 3/25/2023
This week our team got together to discuss the ethics of our project with other teams. The biggest ethical issue that our team came up with was that if users were to hack the Jetson, they could alter the built in rules and it could misinform children as well as contaminate recycling. During the discussion, the only concern that was brought up was that our idea would just not be effective, so it would teach children a false sense of hope when the outlook of recycling is so bleak. Other than the ethics, we worked on the hardware and Jetson camera integration.
On the hardware side, we got the physical circuit built, working, and able to accept serial input from a usb connected computer (a set up that we will migrate to the Jetson).
In terms of mechanical design, a major change we made after talking to the TA and professor was deciding to make the entire frame and door out of wood to avoid the risk of structural integrity that came with the acrylic. We also decided to use a flexible coupling shaft between the arduino and the axle for better movement.
Aichen and Ting struggled to get the camera working with the Jetson. We got the Jetson to recognize that the camera was present, but when the streaming screen popped up, it would just be black and there would be errors. Ting worked with Samuel to debug, but found that it would be better to just try a USB camera instead. Samuel lent the camera that his team used with their capstone, and Aichen is working on testing it with Jetson to see if this is the correct path to go down.
Our biggest risk now lies in the camera subsystem. Without the camera working and being able to capture, we cannot test our detection and YOLO classification algorithm on real time pictures. Because we are still not sure what the roots of the problem are (broken Jetson or unsuitable camera type), debugging and setting up the camera may take some time. Other than that, another risk lies in the sizing of the inner door. However, this part should not be too concerning as we could always start with extra space and make adjustments after experimentations.
A great thing for us, the hardware work is caught up and the whole hardware circuit, as well as (serial) communication between Jetson and Arduino is both done. We are a little behind on mechanics as there are still more parts to be ordered and it is hard to finalize measurements without physical experimentation. The ML system alone is on track as training seemed to return great results and the inference code could be run on Jetson as expected. Soon, we will start fine tuning. As mentioned in risks, the camera is taking us much longer than expected and it is hard to do live testing of detection & classification without that set up well.
Looking ahead, our goal for this next week is to catch up as much as we can in terms of our schedule so that we are prepared enough for the interim demo. For the demo itself, as a minimum we hope to have the Jetson classification + hardware operation working, however, our goal by this time is to have everything besides the mechanical portion somewhat integrated and working together. This is essentially to buy time for our mechanical parts to be completely ordered and arrive, and after the demo we can spend the final three weeks fine tuning and connecting our hardware to the mechanical parts to the best of our abilities.