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Alex’s Status Report 04/27

I’ve made a bunch of spare parts for everything we can. This is in preparation for the final demo this coming week. This week I mainly worked on integrating my subsystems with the pongpal robot. Specifically, I’ve been working on firing using the raspberry pi, integration testing that to make sure the accuracy is what we expect given our previous tests. It turns out that when I was testing last week I was adding a little bit of stochasticity to the pressure system (due to the bouncing of the wires when I connected them as I discussed during our final presentation) because it is now performing slightly better.

I am on schedule.

I look forward to finishing Pongpal next week!

Alex’s Status Report for 4/6/24

I used the demo this past week as a forcing function for my subsystems. I tested out the accuracy of the ball detection (admittedly this was right before the presentation) and found that it was worse than I expected because I was unable to capture as many frames as I had wanted. Later that day I refactored the code to take this into account. I also finally tested the motors we have and we found that we were lacking in power to launch the ping pong ball (more on this later). Finally, I got the cup detection working, but later this week I found that the code I wrote was not invariant to LIDAR rotation and have been debugging that for the last couple of days.

Next week I plan on ordering another round of parts for our pressure launching mechanism. The parts I am planning to order are larger tubes so that more air will be released when fired and also a larger motor. I also plan on finishing up the cup detection by making it invariant to the rotation of the LIDAR.

For verification you can see our group post for more details, but in essence we will be testing our ball detection by facing the camera up, throwing ping pong balls over the camera and measuring where they land by recording the ground with a camera and marking it. Then we will compare where the LIDAR thinks they land with where they actually land and find the difference. For verification of the cup detection we will be doing something similar where we place a cup and then measure out the distance of the cup from the LIDAR and compare that to the actual LIDAR reading. Finally, for the launching system we will test the precision by launching it multiple times (remember if we have issues with accuracy, we can just change the offset so it is accurate aswell).

Alex’s Status Report for 3/30

This week I got the CV camera working with the cup detection, I also polished off ball detection some more. What ended up working the best was getting all the points that the LIDAR generates and then projecting those onto a 2d plane that is perpendicular to the gravity vector. Then I go through all the planes from 2 meters below the camera to the same plane as the camera and I use a simple circle detection algorithm to find the top of the cups. From there, extracting the location and the plane that defines the cups is trivial.

This puts me behind schedule, but I am still confident in my ability to finish everything.

Next week I will be combining ball + cup detection and getting an MVP for the launching subsystem.