Team Status Report for 2/10/24

Potential Risks and Mitigation Strategies

The main risk we currently foresee is being unable to get the IP cameras set up at an actual intersection to send data to the Raspberry Pi. We have a plan in mind for this (detailed in Ankita’s Status Report), but if it doesn’t work we have a couple of contingency plans:

• Run our OpenCV object detection script on one side of the intersection with a wired camera connection, and simulate the other 3 sides for the optimization algorithm.
• Scrap the cameras altogether and just use past traffic camera footage for demo purposes; demo the hardware and software of our system separately and not as one cohesive system.
• Adjust the scope of our project to a miniaturized intersection setup with toy cars and pedestrians. If we end up doing this, we will need to change our schedule to accommodate for the construction of the model. We will also need to change the object detection algorithm significantly.

Changes to System Design

We don’t have any changes to the design as of yet, but we expect to make some in the next week as we finalize our camera setup strategy. If we have to switch to one camera and simulate the other three sides of the intersection, we would be sacrificing our testing metrics; instead of testing our system against a real world situation, we would have to simulate what the real world light timings would be (assuming a fixed-time interval). This would not be as robust a comparison. Scrapping the cameras altogether would mean we would not be able to demonstrate a fully integrated system, which would also take away from our use case requirements. Finally, using a miniaturized intersection setup will require us to replan a lot of our schedule, as creating the model will take up a lot of time.

As of yet, our schedule is unchanged.

Overall Takeaways

The project seems to be on track according to our planned schedule but we will need to ramp up work in the next couple of weeks to get the software working while the camera system gets figured out. Integration will take a great deal of time, so keeping as much slack time as possible is optimal.