Accomplished Tasks
This week was the week for the Design Presentation. I also had an official meeting with the robotics/drone people at their office in Squirrel Hill. While I had hoped to meet with Prof. Basti, he unfortunately could not make it, and I instead met with one of his students, Andrew Jong. The main takeaways from that meeting were:
- Due to how expensive the drones are, Andrew doubts that Prof. Basti would let us simply take them for our own usage. That said, if we were to assist in his work in his fields, then that would be alright (albeit it’s more likely that Andrew himself flies the drone; we’re assisting him and his team with work).
- Andrew proposes a very interesting set of topics to work with. Notably, there is a project on “wildfire drones”, involving drones being able to assist with wildfire rescue. The drone is designed to perform CV to find objects (potentially very difficult due to all the smoke), and also aims to plot what is seen on a map, so that we know 1) who/what needs rescuing, 2) how to escape, 3) movement of the fire over time, and more.
- The focus he proposes is that currently their mapping only plots on a 2D surface, leading to inaccurate maps (since there is no accounting for topography). Being able to “search and 3D-annotate” the surroundings would be extremely useful for them.
- In closer regards to our project, for further reach, we can also assist in developing our own perception network (the object detection portion) and sensor modules (the thing gathering the data for object detection). We could put these all together to have a functioning “drone” that we can demonstrate over simulation.
After reporting this discussion to Prof. Kim and Tamal, we had a meeting, to which we decided that we would turn down Andrew’s recommendation, and approach our original project with a new outlook. Rather than using a drone (which, while still viable at a high price, ran the risk of breaking and failing much more likely), we would use a “rover-esque” project. The core essence of the project would be the same; Search and Point would still be done, except this time, it would be by a rover running along the ground. Thus, a new set of research began on finding a rover, with the same capabilities as needed prior- having a software API, and able to carry some amount of weight. The benefit to this is that a rover carrying more weight is much more manageable! The main focus now is to find such a rover, and re-shape our project to work on a rover instead. (See below for more.)
Progress
With the pivot to a rover body, it puts me behind schedule. That said, if the rover does have the abilities to have a software API, this can potentially relieve a lot of issues for the future, allowing for reduced time then. To make up for the fact that we are behind on obtaining parts, with the help of TA Aden, I found the optimal solution may be the Waveshare WAVE ROVER, which contains nearly everything we are looking for (software API, GPIO pins, etc.). I would need to analyze how the WAVE ROVER controls work (as per my original task of “controlling the rover”), but determining our rover body to be this would bring us back on track.
Next Week’s Deliverables
Next week, I plan to have everything ordered and requested, particularly the drone. I plan to also analyze how ESP32 communication works with JSON commands, and generally speaking, how to control the WAVE ROVER. By our next meeting with Prof. Kim, we should have solidified how this project will be implemented moving forward (and get everything ordered/requested prior to spring break).