This week I presented the project proposal for my group. As a group, we decided what information we wanted to convey in the presentation. Afterwards, I reviewed the slides and helped make the slides better for presenting–engaging and readable. During our meeting, Professor Fedder stressed that we must be able to answer “why” questions about our use case and requirements. To be prepared and effectively communicate our proposal, I researched current search and rescue drone applications and their standards, the drone market, and different radars–specifically our mmWave radar to gain more knowledge about it but also possible other choices for our device like lidar. After performing this research, I distilled what I learned into readable slides. I did my best to make our device easily imaginable by equating size with an iPhone 12, weight with half a bottle of water, and finishing our user requirements with a clear price comparison. Once the slides were polished, I practiced and timed out the presentation. Moving on, our progress is on schedule. In order to stay on track, I need to research ML algorithms to implement that would best achieve our goal of human detection classification. Therefore, I will perform this research and hopefully start training one architecture on our dataset, which we have already chosen.
Ayesha's Status Reports
Ayesha’s Status Report for 2/11
This week I worked on finishing our project proposal slides for our class presentations. Specifically I worked on helping redefine our user and design requirements so that there was a clear distinction from the user and technical perspective. This included refining the metrics we had discussed and creating valid explanations behind each one. For the remainder of this week, I took into account some of the feedback we received from the questioning portion of the proposal presentation and looked into potential ways to address them. This included looking into temperature sensors and seeing how feasible it would be to include that aspect post-MVP. This also included refining our testing plan by thinking about what materials would give us the best results – I found that using varying thicknesses and opacities would allow us to best test our radar detection model. I also did a bit more research on fire search and rescue missions, after receiving feedback to narrow our scope down a bit. The research was mainly to see if we could get our device close enough to a fire, without having it melt or malfunction. From what we had previously researched, it seems as though we can get close enough to the fire to properly run our radar detection, but in edge cases where the obstructions require a smaller radius, our device would not be able to go closer to detect. Lastly, I started planning my own schedule for the next few weeks since the Gantt chart was quite large and I couldn’t break down all of my tasks to the checkpoints I wanted. I did not make a formal Gantt chart but I listed what I want to do/what that would require, and the deadlines I would like to finish those by.
My progress is on schedule. Next week I plan to look into buying a domain and setting up a general web app framework for our project. I also plan to work with my group mates on the design slides.