Cynthia’s Status Report 3/8

Accomplishments:

This week I set up the L515 camera and obtained the depth stream along with the RGB stream. This took longer than expected because of compatibility issues due to my computer version, the SDK version, and the camera being outdated. A picture of the obtained streams is attached below. Additionally, I spent time improving our design report draft and adding more diagrams.

Progress:

We are on schedule now that we have finished the design report and have both our Jetson and L515 camera set up.

Future deliverables:

The week following spring break, I plan on writing code in the RealSense Software Development Kit to be able to obtain a constant stream of the distance from our camera to a grid of points I specify in the frame, and to start writing the depth filtering code.

Cynthia’s Status Report 2/22

Accomplishments:

This week we finished a draft of our written design review. The content I wrote specifically were the design requirements, the software diagram and description, and the software system implementation. I redesigned our software system as I did more research and identified possible risks with our previous plan, and wrote some code to start obtaining depth maps.

Progress:

We are ahead of schedule with the written design report because we will be finished with our draft by tomorrow, the 23rd. We are on schedule with the start of our project and initialization, but risk falling behind this week or next if our tasks take longer than expected or we encounter some errors with our technology. We had a later start than expected with our technology because it took longer to receive a few necessary parts we ordered, such as the microSD card.

Future deliverables:

This week we will be editing our draft of the design proposal, and hopefully by next week we will have our devices initialized and will be successfully able to obtain data from our L515 camera, start on the code to obtain and interpret depth mappings, and start working further past the Jetson initialization.

Cynthia’s Status Report for 2/15

Accomplishments:

This week, I worked mainly on our Design Review presentation.  I worked on the Use Case Requirements, Technical Challenges, and Implementation Plan.  Specifically, I researched more into the differences between using CV for obstacles vs creating a simple algorithm utilizing the depth and distance detection of the L515 LiDAR Camera for object classification and added this differentiation to our presentation.  Additionally, I created the Top Level Design flow chart and the diagram for the cane.  I am additionally preparing to present our slides on Monday.  I also researched the main libraries I will be using to implement the object detection and to gather the distance information needed, specifically the libraries OpenCV, TensorFlow object detection API, RealsenseCamera, and pyRealSense2.

Progress:

Our project is on schedule.  We are meeting on Sunday to start initialization.

Future Deliverables:

I will present this week, then we will be working on the written report for the Design Review.  Additionally, we should have our Jetson Nano initialized by the end of the week and possibly pseudocode for the CV.

Cynthia’s Status Report for 2/8

This week my main two focuses were the quantitative aspects of the proposal presentation slides and the research behind the possible microcontrollers we could use.  For the presentation, I mainly worked on the quantitative Use-Case Requirements, Solution Approach, and Metrics sections, researching what we should base values such as detection range on.  For researching microcontrollers, I specifically did a comparison between Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi 5, NVIDIA Jetson ORIN Nano, NVIDIA Jetson ORIN Nano, NVIDIA Jetson XAVIER, NVIDIA Jetson Nano 4GB, and NVIDIA Jetson Nano 2GB to determine that the NVIDIA Jetson ORIN Nano is ideal for our project given our performance, weight, power supply, and power efficiency requirements.  We then received this microcontroller from the inventory.

I am on schedule, since our main plan this week was to obtain the individual parts needed for our project.

In the next week I hope to discover how the data from the LiDAR camera is formatted and I hope to determine the libraries I will use to process and analyze the photo stream.  I additionally plan to start researching existing object detection code and determining general pseudocode for my algorithm.