George’s Status Report for 2/11/2023

Progress

  • Worked, Practiced and Presented Proposal Slides
  • Talked about design trade-offs for docking mechanism and software challenges
  • Worked with Team to pick out parts, and started putting a spreadsheet together for what parts to order
  • Downloaded, installed SQLite3 in linux (Xavier) environment.
  • Started designing Schema for SQLITE database for bin tracking system

Schedule:

  • I am on Schedule

Next week, hope to complete the SQLITE db set-up milestone with schema working, as well as start looking into path-finding algorithms.

 

Team Status Report for 2/11/2023

The most significant risk for our project at this point is acquiring a LIDAR camera from the ECE parts inventory that’s suitable for our needs. We’re choosing to use an Intel RealSense camera as opposed to a 360-camera since any trash bin will cause a significant obstruction that we have to process away as not being a wall or other flat obstacle. Based on background research, we think mapping with a fixed FOV camera will provide acceptable performance.

Another risk at the moment is going to be the docking mechanism, which we discussed in detail on Wednesday following the proposal presentations. We’re thinking about using an omnidirectional system to avoid alignment complexity with the robot’s movement. We believe this will save time and help us to meet/exceed our design target.

We didn’t make any design changes this week, and are on schedule with respect to the timeline in our proposal.

Our project includes considerations for economics and general welfare. The automated system is intended to relieve the workload on janitorial staff, and allows them to focus and invest time in other tasks. Regardless of the system, bins must be emptied to maintain a private and healthy office environment.

We started putting together a parts list and submitted our first request from the ECE inventory! Yay!

About Our Project

Many office workers have a tiny trash can near their desk, which regularly overflows forcing janitors to make repeated trips to hundreds of tiny trash-bins scattered across an office space. It is inconvenient and unhygienic for office workers to sit next to days old trash, and it’s inefficient and a breach of privacy for janitorial staff to check hundreds of possibly empty bins which may be located in sensitive areas. Thus we have decided to build a personal assistant robot that can take out an office worker’s trash can and bring it to a centralized dumping ground, where janitorial staff will empty dirty bins and place clean bins for pickup.