This week, overall, I spent more than 12 hours to work on the capstone project. First, I finalized all the parts for the conveyor belts. I’ve decided to use 12v DC motors mounted on the bottom aluminum extrusion with 20:48 teeth pulleys. I chose rubber strips as a belt since it has enough friction to hold the trash items but is also less expensive than PVC used in standard. Then, I’ve spent some of my time on the build consistently throughout the week to cut out the acrylic boards and make holes to nail the boards to the extrusions. Hirani and I were able to manage to put all of them. Last but not least, I worked extensively on setting up Isaac ROS to run VSLAM, which I was planning to use for path finding algorithm.
I was able to run the rviz2, but ran into a problem with the computer lagging when downloading the visual slam package. Yet, I stopped debugging it due to the changes explained below.
My progress on the build and path finding algorithm was behind the schedule. To catch up with the schedule, and since the interim demo is coming up soon, Hirani and I decided to pivot our focus from the build to writing functional codes for motor and pick up mechanism so that we can showcase these components working. Also, I put halt to implement path finding algorithm, because I realized I was making the algorithm too complicated that it would not be able to work before the interim demo. To mitigate this issue, as Hirani and I are working on build and ROS together, we decided to work on motion control on Raspberry Pi together, which we identified as the most integral part and push the implementation of VSLAM for additional cases we want to implement after the interim demo. In this way, we will be able to complete the codes by Monday or so and finish building conveyor belts and rollers by the end of the week to meet the interim demo deadline.
My action items, therefore, will be:
- Write codes for motion control and pick-up mechanisms of the robot in Python
- Integrate Raspberry pi to the robot base
- Finish building the conveyor belts
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