Aditti’s Status Report for 4/01

This work was focused on integration and testing, and implementing the code for navigation towards a scent source. Caroline set up the main logic for scanning in place upon detection of a scent (decided by a threshold), and I helped debug the code. I later set up the code so that detection is set based on gradients and an increasing slope of the best-fit line over a period of one second. We tested out the code using the ENS160 TVOC readings for the alcohol scent. We then switched over to the Grove VOC reading instead as it was giving us more reliable results. We also concluded that the inclusion of a pump to suction air into the car was not a feasible solution to fix the problem of our sensors’ sensitivity and latency in pick-up. We will need a fan behind the source to blow the evaporating particles to ensure that the scent reaches the sensors in time. As we still don’t have the Arduino Mega, we cannot read from multiple sensors at once due to memory constraints and cannot use a combination of sensor readings to predict our results as we intended to at the beginning. We fixed the robot motor issues with some speed control and tuning, which now causes the robot to go faster than we wanted but with less skidding. I also changed the random exploration to compute the next set of coordinates in terms of polar coordinates rather than cartesian. The progress is slower than what I wanted, but given the constraints of not having all the parts and the interim demo coming up, we are trying to prepare as best as we can for the upcoming week. Next week, I hope to switch over to the Arduino Mega and be readings from all three sensors and to test out the code with multiple different substances to ensure that we can differentiate between them.