Caroline’s Status Report for 3/25

This week, I worked more on robot assembly and assisting with the integration of our different subsystems. I glued the components of the robot together and the motors are finally secure which has improved the accuracy of the robots movement. While working on integration of the sensor and motion systems, I helped test and debug when we ran into problems. We ran a few informal tests with the ENS160 sensor by thresholding the ethanol reading and were successful in getting the robot to stop when alcohol was placed around 6 inches away from the sensor. Initially, our goal with integration was to see if we could let the robot run while sampling and collecting data, but we ran into unexpected issues due to Arduino hardware constraints. Our program was too memory intensive to run on the Arduino, so we were unable to transmit the sensor data wirelessly. I ordered an Arduino Mega and another Grove shield and we will have to replace our old Arduino Uno as soon as the part arrives. In the meantime, we can still collect data through a wired connection, but our priority is more focused on integration and preparing for the interim demo. Potentially we will use a more simple thresholding method for scent detection instead of a classification algorithm for our interim demo, so robust dataset collection is not the number one priority at this stage. We will need to define as soon as possible what we aim to accomplish before the demo and form our plan for next week accordingly.