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Teddy’s Status Report for 3/29

This week was spent doing work for the conveyor belt, updated gantry frame, and the end-effector. I was able to construct a rough conveyor belt when the materials arrived, such that the cloth has enough tension where it rolls when the bars it is wrapped around rotate. I spent some time working out how the new gantry frame will be build using the new aluminum extrusions, with the plan being to cut the rods sometime next week for assembly. I was also able to finish the design of the end-effector by attaching a solenoid to the end-effector such that a hole is plugged and unplugged to release the objects grabbed by the suction end-effector. I plan to attach it to the gantry tomorrow so that it is ready in time for demo.

Next week I hope to rebuild the frame and attach a stepper motor to the conveyor belt so that it is able to turn when commanded by the Arduino. I also hope to start the movement estimation code so that the gantry can move to the object’s location given that it is moving at a constant speed after detection. I am on schedule.

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Team Status Report for 3/29

What are the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project? How are these risks being managed? What contingency plans are ready?

One of the most significant risks currently is that the stepper motors will not have enough speed to complete the pickup sequence in 8s. We have had to run the gantry slower than the maximum setting as the frame currently isn’t well-built enough to handle the stresses. We plan to address this by changing the frame to using aluminum extrusions instead of aluminum angles. One other risk is that the stereo camera might not be accurate enough to sense the depth for accurate placement of the end-effector on the trash items. Currently our contingency plan for this is to use a pressure sensor to detect when the end-effector touches the object.

Were any changes made to the existing design of the system (requirements, block diagram, system spec, etc)? Why was this change necessary, what costs does the change incur, and how will these costs be mitigated going forward?

Other than the change to the frame mentioned above, there are no planned changes to the existing system. This change was necessary as parts of the gantry were bending and buckling during the gantry’s movements. Replacing the aluminum parts costs around $60, which is not much of a problem since after the purchase we still have around $250 of budget remaining.

Provide an updated schedule if changes have occurred.

There are no schedule changes as of now.

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Alejandro’s Status Report for 3/29

I spent the majority of the week figuring out how to increase the speed on the motors controlled by the Arduino and fixed the vibration issue that would occur with them. The movement produced by the gantry system in the xy plane involved a considerable amount of vibration and slow movement. In order to fix this, I had to modify the C++ code for the Arduino so that the commands sent to the motors were more frequent to keep the motors from stopping at each step that they would execute in terms of their movement (they’re stepper motors). Additionally, I started implementing the code to control the Z axis, in this case the end effector motor. We don’t have a third cable to control the motor so I have to wait for it to arrive in order to verify that it works in conjunction with the other two motors of the gantry system.

My progress is currently on schedule.

For next week, I plan on finishing the code to execute a complete pick up and drop sequence for specific trash types. I also plan on programming the conveyor belt to move once built.  

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Ethan’s Status Report for 3/29

This week, I worked on setting up the Jetson Orin Nano. I currently was only able to setup PyTorch after a long couple of days because I hit a couple of roadblocks with setting up CUDA and cuDNN, Most of my issues stemmed from incorrect paths that weren’t properly set in the environment variables and incorrect versions downloaded by “pip3 install torch”.  Unfortunately most of progress was wiped as I accidentally did something to the drivers (I have no idea what because I was levels deep in random Nvidia documents). In a better light, I also wrote some code for Monday’s demo.

Currently, I am behind schedule a little. I plan to fix this by continuing to work the Jetson Orin Nano for the rest of this week and early next week.

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Team Status Report for 3/22

What are the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project? How are these risks being managed? What contingency plans are ready?

The most significant risk to our project is getting the machine learning model to run at a speed that’s close enough to real-time speed.  To do this we plan on making sure that we make a thorough analysis of the speed and accuracy tradeoffs until we reach the most optimal point of performance in the balance between the two. On another note, I next greatest risk is the failure of the gantry system to move fast enough to handle various objects moving along the conveyor belt. A contingency plan is that we’ll have a speed control feature on the web app to slow down the speed in the case that there are too many objects being passed through the conveyor belt for sorting. This would allow our robot to have enough time to sort all of the items being passed through without having to skip any.

Were any changes made to the existing design of the system (requirements, block diagram, system spec, etc)? Why was this change necessary, what costs does the change incur, and how will these costs be mitigated going forward?

There are no current changes made to the existing design of the system.

Provide an updated schedule if changes have occurred.

There are no schedule changes as of now.

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Alejandro’s Status Report for 3/22

I spent the majority of the week programming the Arduino to control the stepper motors to move the gantry’s xy movement. I spent a significant amount of time figuring out how to move each stepper motor to yield a specific spot on the xy coordinate plane. I can now calculate a specific location on the xy plane and move the location where the end effector is to be placed to that specific location. The C++ code is written inside an Arduino file that controls all of the movement and stepper motors. Additionally, I fixed the issue with the web app streaming by moving the server to run on Powershell so that there are no port confusion or firewall issues when running it from WSL on my Windows machine.

My progress is currently on schedule.

For next week, I plan on writing the code to translate the coordinates given from the Jetson to the values needed for the motors of the gantry due to its unique pulley configuration. Additionally, I’ll work on controlling the end effector once it’s physically been added to the system.

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Ethan’s Status Report for 3/22

This week, I started full dataset training for the YOLOv8 OBB model. I implemented the loss function using three tunable hyperparameters that adjust the weight of the bounding box regression loss, the classification loss, and the angle loss. The intent of this was so to show more transparency in the unified loss calculation (the sum of all the previously mentioned loss), and if one loss was too high I could adjust how much the penalty would be. This method would hopefully allow us to better control the model’s convergence and allow for a better check pointing scheme that would save each best model in all four loss types (unified, regression, classification, and angle) to retrain later on. While the model started to train, I started working on creating a Docker image for the Jetson to make porting over the model easier.

Next week, working on some visualization code that would plot the predicted bounding box and class on static images in a clean manner (the core logic of this will be scaled out later for the Jetson)

Currently, I am on schedule.

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Teddy’s Status Report for 3/22

This week was spent working on getting the vacuum end-effector to work. After some testing and design changes, I was able to get the end-effector to the point where it is able to pick up all 4 types of recycling consistently. I still need to add a release mechanism, which should just be a solenoid which opens and closes a hole in the air flow. I’ve designed and 3d-printed a part that should fit onto the end of the z-axis rack. I’ve also started looking into the stereo camera and the repository that comes with it to get the depth map from the camera. I also spent some time this week ordering parts, including the belt for the conveyor belt, silicone tubing for the vacuum pump, and aluminum extrusions for the gantry. The current construction of the gantry’s frame is hypothetically sufficient, but there seems to be severe wobbling, so switching from aluminum angles to aluminum extrusion should hopefully solve the problem.

Next week, I hope to attach the vacuum pump and suction end-effector to the gantry, get the conveyor belt cloth attached, get the depth map from the camera, and if time allows replace the aluminum angles with aluminum extrusion. I am behind schedule but I am catching up to what was planned.

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Alejandro’s Status Report for 3/15

I spent the majority of this week working on reconnecting the Jetson to the webserver, since it no longer connects to my WSL server.js instance. I spent a considerable amount of time trying out different ports and connection methods. The first method I tried was to try and reset the firewall privileges on my laptop, but that failed to work. I then moved onto attempting to change the port forwarding on my device to the WSL port, but that also failed to work properly. The Jetson pings to my laptop but no longer wants to connect to the server. If I am unable to get the websocket working again as I had it before, we may have to shift to a tethered wired connection for the time being. Additionally, the canvas drawing feature is implemented. Also, the gantry xy axis is fully assembled now.

In lieu of this obstacle, I will plan to try one more time to get the websocket connection to work, and if it fails I will shift to using a wired connection. Additionally, I will test the canvas drawing with some test values next week as well.

I am currently on schedule aside from the minor hiccup.

 

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Teddy’s Status Report for 3/15

Most of the time spent this week was on expanding and reinforcing the gantry to compensate for the sag caused by scaling up the design of the 4xidraw. I was able to construct a large frame around the conveyor belt in order to provide a mount for the 4xidraw. I then had to redesign some of the parts of the 4xidraw so that there would be no sag; this involved making one of the rods slide along the frame so that it supported the end-effector. I was also able to print out the rack so that the rack-and-pinion z-axis movement was complete. I’ve also begun testing the vacuum pump with the suction cup. It seems to be able to pick up flat, non-porous objects like plastic consistently, however it does not work as well with porous materials like paper.

Next week I plan to start working on programming the xy movement and will hopefully finish a fleshed out design of the vacuum end-effector. I am slightly behind schedule as I didn’t anticipate the rebuilding of the gantry to take as long as it did.

The picture of the current gantry is shown below: