Carnegie Mellon ECE Capstone // Spring 2024 // Ankita Chatterjee, Kaitlyn Liu, Zina Zarzycki
Potential Risks and Mitigation Strategies Currently we are having challenges setting up the RPi to work with the CMU-Secure WiFi. In case that does not work out, we will instead use a mobile hotspot to provide internet access to our RPi to perform the necessary …
Work Done Last week, I along with our group members worked on and completed our 12-page design report. I completed the design requirements, block diagrams, and summary, as well as the architectural, implementation, testing, and trade study descriptions of the camera interfacing with the Raspberry …
Potential Risks and Mitigation Strategies
While we are feeling more confident with the optimization algorithm and the SUMO simulation platform, our camera situation is still uncertain due to an inability to connect to CMU-SECURE. We’ll be ordering a BLE camera to test our vehicle detection code with in order to see if that’s a better option (since it has less dependence on factors outside of our control.) If we can’t get reliable results with actual camera frames, we’ll just demonstrate our system on traffic camera footage.
Changes to System Design
Our schedule has been changed due to camera and RPi setup issues, and also because we’ll need to train our own Haar classifier. The updated schedule is here. Other than that, the optimization algorithm is mostly on schedule with a little bit of delay due to additional time needed to simulate the traffic in SUMO.
Overall Takeaways and Progress
Work Done This week, I prepared for and gave the design review presentation for my group. I also made some progress on the car detection code, but I realized that we will probably need to train our own Haar cascade, since the ones I found …
Work Done This week, I contributed to the design review presentation with the rest of my group members (the hardware implementation plan, testing approaches, and system specification/block diagram.) I also tried to set up the Raspberry Pi and IP camera (unfortunately, we’re waiting on the …
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:
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.
Work Done This week, I helped out with the proposal presentation slides and did some implementation planning and parts research, particularly for the camera setup. In particular, I made the solution approach and testing, verification, and metrics slides (with input from my team members to …