Team Status Report (3/15/25)

This week, our team has set a goal of being able to combine the subsystems so we have end to end operation, even if there are some bugs, by the end of next week (Friday the 21st). In order to realistically achieve this goal, we’ve set pre-MVPs for each component, and have been making progress towards achieving each of these separate goals. We are all currently debugging specific parts of the project, and will be integrating our subsystems during the week. 

After meeting with Professor Gloria, she suggested that we should try and use a plastic bowl for our above water boat to start with, instead of constructing our own initially. Plastic is inherently waterproof, so we would only need to cut holes for the motors and fill the edges with waterproof paste. This will protect our electronics in the early stages of prototyping and demonstrations. We can improve this by purchasing a premade boat or constructing our own, but for our interim demo, we will probably use a simpler plastic design.

Maddie primarily spent time this week working on taking video and extracting overlapping-enough images to be used in creating the map. This functionality is currently entirely separate from the actual interface, but is functioning and accurate enough for initial implementation. Maddie has also been re-working the Z-direction movement system; the new design is simpler and will likely work better, however, has the potential to negatively impact balance of the boat. She will be prototyping the simplified spool design (more details in personal status report) for the purposes of the pre-MVP, and is confident that this will be enough testing to be able to finalize the design. Maddie has already pre-emptively updated (as a separate code version) the stepper motor code to accommodate the redesign we’re considering/testing this upcoming week.

Emma spent time this week working on the interface between the computer and Raspberry Pi. This week we were focused on getting the back end of the interface working before making GUI improvements. Currently, the back end connection is being made from a socket server. The pi is sending image frames in a loop over the socket, and the computer is sending GPIO requests to control the motors for lateral movement. There are bugs in the implementation right now that are being investigated, mainly that since the frames are being sent and requested so frequently, motor control signals are not being processed. A lot of time has been spent improving the system, but this is still being worked on. 

Abie spent time this week working with the pillow library in python for image processing to group and identify the RGB values of different pixel clusters for classification. Before next Friday, this needs to be implemented with a basic KNN model. Additionally, Abie plans to work with Emma to figure out how to export the camera pictures in a way that is convenient for the code to use. One hurdle with the current code is efficiently processing a large set of images, so this process will need to be updated once it is integrated with the other project systems.