See our Design Review Report here:
Casper’s Individual Status Report Feb 24 2024
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 course of the week (12+ hours).
Over this past week, I have been spending most of my time on creating the simulated search algorithm, which can be found in our Github, and also in the image below.
Currently, the Python software is able to create and visualize a 2D search grid, and the Hexapod is able to take a random step in each time unit.
Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
Unfortunately, I had a fever this past week so was unable to do as much in-person work as I would have liked to; hence, I spent most of my time working on the simulation since I could work at home. As a result, we are slightly behind schedule on getting the Jetsons working and on the robot. Now that I am better this week, I hope to spend more time in the lab rooms completing the hardware setup.
What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
Currently, the Hexapod search algorithm is stateless, so I hope to make some simple optimizations so that it has a better baseline search. I will also need to add functionality such that multiple Hexapods can search efficiently. Then, I will profile speedups in search time vs. number of Hexapods.
Casper’s Individual Status Report Feb 17 2024
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 course of the week (12+ hours).
Over this past week, I have spent the majority of my time bringing up the Hexapod. This has involved assembling (which took a surprising amount of hours, calibration of servos, setting up the Raspberry Pi with the relevant software, and testing the control of the robot. In the meanwhile, I also read a lot into SLAM with my team, since we need to consider how the Medbot is able to locate and move to other Hexapods.
The working robot can be seen in action here!
Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
I think we are somewhat on schedule. We made a decision to only order one Hexapod rather than all three to give us more budget to pivot in case there was some error. So, we have done everything that we set out on the Gantt chart, but only on one robot rather than 3. We think that the bring up of the remaining Hexapods will be much faster, since we will already have experience and suitable tools.
What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
I am delivering the Design Review presentation in this coming week, so I will be spending a majority of my time working on the slide deck and also script. When
Team Status Report for Feb 10 2024
The most significant risk right now is whether or not the hardware for the hexapod works well and whether our current search algorithm is effective for the use case. As contingencies we have other hexapod models that we can order if our current one does not function well and we also have looked into alternative search algorithms for our swarm.
Upon further design discussions, we realized that we would need to implement some sort of SLAM algorithm to ensure that each hexapod can know where they are within the search area. This is important because internal tracking of distance can be erroneous due to any slippage on the hexapod. We also need SLAM in order to guarantee that our hexapods can find each other if there are cases where a hexapod carrying first aid needs to reach a survivor that a separate hexapod has located. This adds a bit of time cost to our project and it also may require us to purchase a better camera module or a lidar. We believe that we can still get these parts within our budget and we will do more research into finding the most cost effective solution.
This change means that we need to add an extra week of research and testing on SLAM into our schedule. We will all be working on this during an upcoming week within February.