Right now, the most significant risk that could jeopardize the success of the project is if our detection algorithm, which is currently done through color detection, is interfered by the environment. Bhavya is working hard on minimizing the interference of the environment after switching over to color detection from object detection(which took too long) but the algorithm is definitely not perfect yet. This is a risk because both the motor control and feed selection modules depend on the accuracy of the bounding boxes outputted by detection. So if detection is a little shaky, the motors could inaccurately pan and feed selection may be wrong. Bhavya is working on mitigating these risks as said in his status report. But the contingency plan is running the system with good lighting and at location/angle where the car along the track never overlaps with another object/background of the same color.
One of the changes we made was using a manual voltage supply to power the race track. We saw that the 9V power supply was providing an electromagnetic field too high, causing the cars to travel fast. By lowering the voltage supply to approximately 4V, the car moves at a slower speed, allowing our system to more easily test. We needed to make this change for now, but we hope to bump up the speed as fast as we can accurately track. No costs were made to our camera system due to this change, since it is a change within the track itself. Another change we made was utilizing simple moving average for feed selection. This means that we are not only changing feeds based on bounding box sizes, but the moving average of it with width of 3. This has been working when the cameras were placed in opposite corners pointing towards the car direction.
Now that we are at the integration period, schedule is up to date.
We didn’t take any convincing photos, but we are looking forward to showing our progress during interim demo next week:)