This week we have three major focuses, integrate parts together, design tests and prepare for the final presentation. A demo video can be found from the team status report to show the test.
The first test we want to perform on gyroscope is the gyroscope drifting. Our testing method is start the car in the game and put the steering wheel on the table. Then we push on the throttle and move the car forward to see if the direction is changing. Besides the information we can get from the game screen, we can also check the log from the program to see the output data, and the steering wheel angle input to the game from the game’s API. If the car’s movement on the screen, program log, and the game API all show that the angle remains constant for more than 1 min, then we think the project has passed the gyroscope drifting test.
The other test is the angle accuracy test. We want to make sure that our data output matches with the real angle of the steering wheel. We need to do this before adding the dead zone on the steering wheel around +/-180 degrees and 0 degree. To run this test, we need to match our program’s data log of output with the angle of the steering wheel in the real world. We start with placing the steering wheel at 0 degree and rotate the steering wheel until 180 degrees. The test should rotate the steering wheel in two different speeds, the first one is to rotate the steering wheel in a constant speed, and the second one is rapidly place the steering wheel to a target angle and see if the data output changes to the target. We current only test this based on our eyes so this test may have some errors, but for now the result looks good. If the steering wheel performs bad, we can buy a protractor and test it again to see where it goes wrong.
Preparing for the final presentation is another important part of works I did this week. To find a good way to explain the Madgwick filter to the audience, I need to read the paper carefully and check the function from the madgwick filter library to illustrate how we process the raw data to present on the slide. I also need to communicate with my teammates, especially Yuxuan Zhu, to help him prepare for the presentation content of the gyroscope section, since he is not very familiar with the approach of gyroscope section.