Accomplished Tasks
These weeks were the weeks for the Design Review and Spring Break. A large chunk of my first week was spent on writing portions of the design review. I was primarily in charge of writing the Design Implementation portion, along with Trade Studies. This took a rather long time, as due to the recent change in our plans (eg. drone -> rover), I had to rework how exactly our rover project would work. The details of the plans are inside the report, but essentially speaking, our project now consists of a rover with a mounted camera/laser that will search and point as previously planned. The overall structure of our system now has an information hub, which will help with information control/parsing/propagation to the three other parts (the rover, the website, and the CV servers).
During Spring Break, I was mostly travelling. However, I also devoted what time I could into looking into the rover communication methods. Since this section of communication is the most critical to be able to have rover guidance, I looked into how the pre-made web application was able to send the JSON commands to the rover. I am currently working on interfacing and/or hacking this web application to be able to send the commands that we desire instead.
Progress
The original goal was to work out all the rover controls by this Wednesday. Prof. Kim had an even larger request of managing to have a full end-to-end product working by our meeting on Wednesday. Our rover, which we had ordered prior to Spring Break was set to arrive over Spring Break, but we have not had any notification of its arrival yet, which is concerning. Since I am in the process of working out the rover controlling right now, I am somewhat on track, though depending on how much progress I am able to accomplish over the coming few days, I may end up slightly behind schedule. Following Prof. Kim’s request would put us ahead of schedule.
Next Week’s Deliverables
Next week, I plan to have the rover be fully controllable using programming. The stretch goal is to have an end-to-end version of the final rover running by our meeting with Prof. Kim on Wednesday. For me, these goals should be essentially the same, as due to the modularity of our system design, the interactions between the three components should be relatively small. Rover movement may need to be packaged and encoded when received from the CV servers, but this should not be a small end portion; getting the rover to move in a general controlled manner is the main plan and goal.