This week I was focused on the controls for the robot. We first had to hook up the motor drivers for the chassis kit before we could do any testing. Essentially, the motor drivers would give us an abstraction between driving the motors via digital writes and PWM, allowing us to ignore some of the nasty details. For the software, I created a mapping of GPIO pins to easy to understand wheel inputs. We have 8, forward and backward and for each wheel. I experimented with the chassis until I had the mappings and controls donw for basic inputs (F/B/R/L).
The testing software was essentially an RC car, where it took keyboard inputs nad outputted the high/low signals. I also started writing the logic for centering the bounding boxes, and deciding the appropriate thresholds. Next week, I want to focus on creating a unified robot chassis framework for the compute, so I can start running tests using the actual/experimental setup. This should be a big step to finishing the driving automation.