Casper’s Individual Status Report Apr 6 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).

We were able to establish a lot of progress over this past week before our interim demo! With our reflashed Jetson, Akash and I were able to create some shell scripts that automates the process for setting up our ROS environments in the Docker containers. With this code in our Github, we are able to easily setup new Jetsons with the correct dependencies for YOLOv8.

Additionally, I was able to write a simple tracking algorithm such that it is able to turn towards and follow humans up to a certain distance. After mounting battery packs and Jetson onto the Hexapod so that it is fully mobile, I was able to test that this algorithm worked (which can be seen in the group updates video)!

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

Over this coming week, I hope to have fully implemented VSLAM on our Jetson, in order to determine whether it is feasible or not. If we decide to proceed with VSLAM, I also hope to add to the shell scripts to automate the setup for this package.

I will also help Kobe with the overall state control and search algorithm since I wrote the simulation code for it. Additionally, I will assemble and manufacture our remaining Hexapods so that we have swarm SAR.