• What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or
photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the week (12+ hours).
Successfully got inter-hexapod communication working over TCP and worked with Kobe extensively to get the Realsense camera Node in ros working rather than using pyrealsense2 like before. We also got slam and yolov8 finally working simultaneously. Too many hours were spent debugging the above.
• Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
Communications are on schedule, but I’ve just today uncovered a weird bug in our realsense camera node that could derail us, we are remedying it by working around the clock.
• What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
Since we have the robot physically constructed, hardware setup, and search algorithm implemented we are still mainly bottlenecked by the bug in the camera node. So after getting it resolved, it is mainly completing the integration and demoing it in an actual grid.
• As you’ve designed, implemented and debugged your project, what new tools or new knowledge did you find it necessary to learn to be able to accomplish these tasks? What learning strategies did you use to acquire this new knowledge?
We recognize that there are quite a few different methods (i.e. learning strategies) for gaining new knowledge — one doesn’t always need to take a class, or read a textbook to learn something new. Informal methods, such as watching an online video or reading a forum post are quite appropriate learning strategies for the acquisition of new knowledge.
I feel like the most important learning strategy I acquired was being able to parse useful information from online forums. Moreover to figure out needed information from poorly written documentation. For example in our project we use Nvidia’s issac ros to facilitate Vslam and object detection, however we had to figure out how to do everything almost from scratch because their examples only work for a particular use case and they don’t explain how to extend it. I also reached out to professors, friends, and others who have worked on similar platforms and their guidance was also essential to our learning.