Team Status Report (3/22/25)

This week, we dedicated our lab lesson on Monday to building the structure of the boat using a plastic bowl and foam board. As mentioned last week, while we were originally planning on starting with a foam raft and later implementing a foam board boat, Professor Gloria suggested the bowl as a way to simplify our design as we know it is buoyant and waterproof. For additional stability, and to help protect our electronics, we added foam board to the sides using a waterproof sealant. We have not attached our motors to the board yet, as they are not waterproof (boo false advertising), however we have ordered new brushed motors. As a group, we feel that we are in a good place for the upcoming interim demo. Our next steps will include waterproofing our electronics and attaching the boat to the underwater unit.

Emma spent time on the motor control and video streaming, and was able to get both working successfully! Last week, there were several bugs in the implementation, which resulted in the socket server of the Raspberry Pi failing to run the livestream and control the motors at the same time. This week, she separated the motor control from the video feed, using an Arduino Nano and Arduino Cloud to remotely control the motors over Wi-Fi at a distance of 10 feet, which is a requirement our project. She was also able to improve the framerate and color clarity for the video streaming on the Raspberry Pi and pick out new motors for our boat.

Abie spent time on the ML algorithm and was able to implement code that used a KNN model from an external library (scikit-learn) to classify groups of pixels as one of two coral types, pink or blue, and then classify each coral color type as one of four categories: bleached, partially bleached, pale, and healthy. Her next steps include adding more training data for the model and increasing the ability of the model to exclude the background from the sections being classified.

Maddie spent time engineering a waterproof sleeving for our underwater cables and redesigning the spool that we will use to control the z-direction of our project. Our stepper motor and driver came in this week, so she was also able to finally set-up the stepper motor with position tracking code as well as continue working on the image recombination code.