Category: Team Status Reports

Risk and Risk Management

The biggest risk to our project right now is not finishing the final document. Our mitigation plan is to start early.

System Design Changes

As of now there hasn’t been a change to the existing design of the system.

Schedule

The schedule has not changed and everyone is on schedule.

Comprehensive Testing

• LAOE:
  • Testing the location of the LAOE projection onto the floor (16 total cases of measured distance and size of the projection in meters and compared it to the calculated distance and size of the projection)
  • Testing the intersection of the LAOE with the user (used various locations of a person either in the LAOE, on of the edges of the LAOE, and outside of the LAOE and checked whether the returned value matched)
  • Testing the necessary change calculated by the LAOE (measuring the distance from the chin that the LAOE ends at after the adjustment is made and whether or not the LAOE is past the chin or above)
• User Position Extraction:
  • Testing the return value of the position (various images of a person’s face throughout the room and measuring the returned value against the actual position)
  • Testing the face detection limits (testing various distances until the program is unable to detect a face)
• Motor System:
  • Timed the total time it takes for the blinds to move up/down completely
•   Overall Tests:
  • Timed the feedback latency (time it takes for the blinds to determine a change and send it to the motor)
  • Tested the overall accuracy (the accuracy in relative error of the change made and whether or not a change was actually made)

Some changes made based on the findings were some more leniency for the LAOE intersection, fine tuning the user position detection, and changing the speeds of the motor.

Risk and Risk Management

The major risk is finding ways to improve our system’s accuracy. Our LAOE’s accuracy and User Position Extraction’s accuracy is alright at closer distances, but at further distances and at specific edge cases (the edges of projection of light; extreme angles in relation to the camera), our system is not super accurate.  We will try to think of ways to make our calculations more accurate, but we are also limited by the accuracy of things like OpenCV, the LIDAR data, etc.

Although not exactly a risk, but we are in general also trying to come up with ways to improve the user experience, in response to our interim demo. Our motor moves slightly faster than it did before (but there is a limit as to how fast it can move, since the motor is small, to make the system smaller and less invasive). We have also improved our LAOE algorithm to have more false positives, to be on the safe side to ensure light does not hit the user’s face. We will continue thinking about improving the user experience moving forward, but it’s hard to come up with ideas.

System Design Changes

As of now there hasn’t been a change to the existing design of the system.

Schedule

The schedule has not changed yet, and everyone is roughly on track for the time being, though the software portion is slightly behind with getting the Raspberry Pi on board.

Risk and Risk Management

The major risk that we have is the physical installation of the blinds. The blinds need to be drilled into a window, but we cannot legally drill the blinds into the windows of any of our houses. Our current workaround for this is to connect the blinds to a cardboard construct and attach that construct to the windows, or wherever we want to put them. We also need command strips in order to connect the cardboard to the window, but if these do not arrive on time then we will temporarily use duct tape.

System Design Changes

As of now there hasn’t been a change to the existing design of the system.

Schedule

The schedule has not changed yet, and everyone is roughly on track for the time being.

Risk and Risk Management

The major risk that we have is related to full integration testing. Since real time testing requires the weather to be sunny and we also have other time commitments so we need the sunny day to line up with our availability to test for capstone. This makes rapid revision and testing very difficult. We aim to mitigate this by utilizing past data from sunny day to simulate a sunny day. We won’t be able to get real life confirmation but we can double check the response to what we think is the ideal response.

System Design Changes

As of now there hasn’t been a change to the existing design of the system.

Schedule

The schedule has not changed yet, and everyone is roughly on track for the time being.

Risk and Risk Management

One risk that we have is related to 3D printing the parts. We know the entire process of printing will take 9 hours, but it will likely be a couple days before we actually receive the parts we want. We also don’t (as of now) know the cost of the order (we recently requested a quote). If it goes over budget, we might have to eliminate some of the parts we want. However, only a couple pieces are central to the functioning of our project, so in the case it’s not affordable, we’ll at least try to maintain those pieces (e.g. the ‘gear’ that holds onto the blinds’ beaded cord lock). In the meantime, however, everyone is working in parallel on their own portions.

Other risks include that the depth sensor of the D455’s depth sensor resolution isn’t as high as expected. From what has been seen, it is closer to 848×480 as opposed to the 1280×720 that was expected (listed on their website); this may affect the accuracy results of the User Position Extraction. Another risk is the possibility that our LAOE algorithm might not work as accurate as expected, since we have only tested it on very little data so far. We hope to do more testing in the future regarding the accuracies of these algorithms.

System Design Changes

As of now there hasn’t been a change to the existing design of the system.

Schedule

The schedule has not changed yet, and everyone is roughly on track for the time being.

Risks and Risk Management

After we received the D455 LIDAR camera, our most significant risk as of now is probably how our LAOE testing is dependent on not only our schedules, but the weather as well, as we can only test on sunny days. To combat this, we want to collect as much data as possible early on. So far, we have a few data points from sunny days previously in the semester, but we want to continue to collect as much as possible during varying times of day.

System Design Changes

There are no system design changes this week.

Schedule

The schedule has not changed, and everything on both the software side and hardware side are on track.

Teamwork Adjustments

No adjustments have been made as of now, as everyone is roughly still on schedule. All team members have been meeting up with each other throughout the week, and there are no new design challenges yet.

New Tools

With our finished Design Report, we have no new tools to learn besides the ones we had already planned on learning.

Risks and Risk Management

The most significant risk as of now is probably waiting for the Intel RealSense D455’s arrival because we really need to the D455 to meet our project requirements. It is the prerequisite for a lot of the parts for our project, like the face detection software testing. This risk is being managed by working with the L515 we currently possess since the data produced by the D455 and L515 should be very similar outside of range and resolution differences (which is why we haven’t returned it yet). They use the same library (pyrealsense2) as well.

System Design Changes

There are no system design changes this week.

Schedule

The schedule only changed for Jeff, who is handling hardware, since the D455 did not arrive this week. Because of this, Jeff has moved the task of building the motorized blinds up the schedule until the D455 camera arrives, and has been working on that this week. The schedule for the software side of things has not been changed because the LAOE algorithm does not need camera data, and the face detection software is temporarily being made with the L515 camera data.

Teamwork Adjustments

No adjustments have been made as of now, as everyone is roughly still on schedule. All team members have been meeting up with each other throughout the week, and there are no new design challenges yet.

Risks and Risk Management

The most significant risks as of now is probably how our LAOE testing is dependent on not only our schedules, but the weather as well (we can only test when it’s sunny). The contingency plan for this risk is to get as much data as possible on sunny days.

System Design Changes

So far there are no real changes to the design/requirements yet, besides needing to change our Intel RealSense Lidar Camera L515 to an Intel RealSense Depth Camera D455. This change was necessary because the L515 doesn’t perform well in sunlight/ambient light, and the switch impacts us by making us pay significantly more for the D455 rather than just borrowing the L515 from ECE Receiving. We’ve looked into the D455 about possible light issues, so there should be no issue on that front.

Schedule

The schedule so far has not changed, but the schedule moving forward will likely largely depend on how accurate our LAOE algorithm is after adjustments and more testing.

Us taking data together!

Risks and Risk Management

The most significant risks of our project is if we are unable to set up or obtain the LIDAR/Camera device in time, as not many other steps can be performed in parallel. This risk is being managed by trying to reserve this device as soon as possible, so that the rest of the project can continue smoothly. If we don’t manage to get the reservation, we are ready to order the device as it is still within our budget.

System Design Changes

We more precisely defined the scope of the project. We decided that for our MVP, we won’t account for weather (cloudy/rainy days), reflected/artificial light, and objects blocking the window. We want our project to work in a 300 ft^2 room, but that room must be rectangular, and the length of the room is not over 30 feet. We want our design to more specifically block light from the person’s face. Our project is targeting a room on a second floor (at a height of roughly 10 ft. above ground). It will work with at most three people in the room (as it would be difficult to test otherwise). Our design will work as long as nothing in the room moves but people (as such, our project will also not work with pets). It assumes the window is closed, since windy weather could interfere with the blinds’ function. These changes were necessary to better fit the scope in our minds. Although this makes our project less flexible, it makes it more feasible. The schedule that was made previously will stay the same.

Ethical Considerations

Our project includes considerations for personal health. It will improve people’s eyes, as it will block harmful sunrays. It will also help people’s mental health, as research suggests natural light improves mood. 

Experiment

The bag experiment listed in Jeff and Dianne’s status reports. Fun group meeting that helped us better determine where the area of light hits.