This week, I worked with the team to do some final fine-tuning of the different components of our project. We first tried to fine-tune the magnetometer (compass) since that was the least robust part of our hardware system. The compass was able to give orientation direction pretty well when the chip is always parallel to the floor. We wrote a mathematical equation to calculate the offset of the compass reading from true north and combined this with A*’s given direction to find the final direction to buzz the haptics at. We fine-tuned the compass as best we could but our final design would require the compass to be parallel to the floor always. If the compass tilted forwards or backwards, some readings may be slightly off. Other parts of our system were quite robust at this point when we tested it in Hammerschlag Hall. We received our final haptic sensors and added them to our system. Our system is complete with the setup in Hammerschlag Hall but moving to a new location would require some calibration and a bit of fine-tuning. We are also in the progress of integrating our entire system to a belt form factor.
This week we fine-tuned our system by doing more tests on it. Our CV stack is already quite robust, so we mainly tested the navigation, magnetometer, and haptics in the captured frame. We placed different configurations of obstacles in the room and had the person hold the entire circuit and navigate around the room. We tweaked the vibration patterns so that it would always buzz so the blind person knows where to go. We handled special error cases such as if the person was detected to be inside an obstacle. In those cases we would just vibrate the last known direction and make sure the person exits the obstacle first. We tested our entire system until we were quite sure this would work well.
Our progress is on schedule but we would still need to work hard this next week to complete all the deliverables.
Next week, we hope to finish integrating our product into the belt form factor. We would also need to to calibrate and set up the demo environment before the actual demo day. We also have the project video and final report coming up, so we would start working on that soon. Our project poster is in progress and will be completed by Monday.