System Progress & Design
This week we finished the mid-term demo, where we showed the current state of the TrashDash system including voice activation, gesture detection, and chassis motion. From the feedback several improvements were identified and discussed. First, to reduce the risk of unintentional gesture triggers, switching from Thumbs Up to a less commonly made gesture such as Thumbs Down was considered, as it is less likely to be accidentally activated in everyday scenarios. Second, the obstacle detection threshold for the ToF sensors should be increased to give the robot more time to decelerate before reaching an obstacle, as the current threshold is too short to allow safe braking at operating speed. We also finished ordering all of our hardware devices that we are going to use this week.
Risk and Mitigation
For this project, one of the potential risks is that the depth camera can not give an accurate distance measurement for the user’s position. The mitigation strategy is to use depth readings from several consecutive frames and average them to smooth out noise and reduce the impact of individual bad readings. Or we can make use of the tof sensors to detect if we already reached the user. Also, if the voice module is not able to detect the command in a noisy environment, it’s also possible to add the function of triggering the robot with http response directly from the computer.
Plan for Next Week
Our next step will be making the robot actively move toward the user as well as testing the whole system.
Validation
End-to-end validation trials are conducted with users seated at distances of 1 m, 2.5 m, and 4 m in realistic dormitory environments. Each trial evaluates successful navigation to the user’s hand, obstacle-free path execution, trash collection completion, and return to idle state. For a 4 m distance, total runtime must remain below 10 seconds. In addition to quantitative performance metrics, qualitative user feedback is collected to assess perceived responsiveness, safety, and convenience. This validation ensures that TrashDash not only meets technical specifications but also fulfills its intended purpose of improving hygiene and accessibility in shared living environments.