Category: Akash’s Individual Status Reports

• 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?

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).

This week was one with a lot of success for our team, Casper, Kobe and I were successfully able to integrate our code to consistently work from Sunday to Wednesday to ultimately be able to be able to be demo something we were proud of. We were able to get one complete robot working detecting a human and maneuvering towards it. After the demo I worked with my teammates to come up with an effective ros architecture and implementing a better state machine. My individual task right now has switched to focusing on communications between the hexapods and getting the other hexapods set up. I’m currently working on the code on of them since we are waiting on more SSD’s to arrive to effectively set up our other 2 Jetsons

• Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

This week we are on track with our modified schedule, we do need to keep the pace up if we need to deliver three robots that are working with each other.

• What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?

Deliverables are get the communication done and then setting up our other Jetsons and have them effectively communicate with each other such as heartbeats and messages which can cause state transitions.

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
A lot of accomplishments got robot controls completely done and integrated, soldered our power connector to power on our hexapod. Our SD card got corrupted so grinded to get our code back to the previous state on an SSD instead. Definitely put like 40+ hours this week lol. Figured out a lot of our previous weird docker container behavior such as aliasing causing us problems.

• Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

We are barely on track since we finally got our code back to the state it was pre-SD card corruption. So we are barely on track right now. Just need to keep grinding.

• What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
Finish one complete hexapod and get inter hexapod communication code working to an extant.

• 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).

Got the controls library working and fixed the batteries. Figured out the battery issue was caused by the batteries discharging too much since they are unprotected so created a pseudo-BMS (battery management system). Following a server-client architecture with a client on the jetson that sends commands to the Raspberry Pi using tcp.

• Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?

On track right now since we are very close to integrating the controls with the overall functionality. Need to test on campus wifi soon and finish the integration next week.

• What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
Finish integration and get ready for the demo.

• 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).

After spending a lot of hours in trying to get the ros control library to work (Too many including working on it throughout spring break) I got it completely working. However, we soon realized that it was not good enough for our control requirements and was jittery and buggy. this is because the library was made as a hobbyist project by a full-time SWE. This was devastating but we came to the conclusion that it would be better to just refactor the existing freenove library and control it as we know that that library works.

• Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
I would say I am behind because of the weeks lost going behind the faulty Ros library. This week I have to compensate by working hard to get the existing control library with a server-client architecture working and also get working on the SLAM aspect since the demo date is coming up very soon!

• What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
Get the controls library completely functional and work with Casper and setup the SLAM ros library.

I mainly worked on setting up the controls aspect of the robot using a raspberry pi 4. I set up Ubuntu on it and ROS1 to test if the library works. There were a lot of setbacks because we were initially using a pi 3 that does not support ubuntu 20.04 desktop because of less RAM and a bunch of extra setup because ubuntu 20.04 desktop isn’t supported by default on a Pi 4 but its up and working now.

In the future we will either use it as it is or port the ros library into the Jetson and change the ros drivers package to be compliant with the jetson hardware.

I practiced and presented our design review presentation. After doing more research and talking with my Autonomous Robotics professor we got a data point that our Jetson Nano might not be enough to support ROS, Object Detection, and SLAM. So we upgraded to using Jetson Orin Nanos instead. I did some work setting them up and playing with ROS on the RaspberryPI to see if the existing hexapod-controlling ros library we found on Git Hub worked.

I would say I am on schedule.

Ideally, I want to get the robot controlled with ROS using the RaspberryPI and then port it to the Jetson directly controlling it using the Issac ROS Bridge.