System Progress This week
We completed the full end-to-end system pipeline. The voice module receives a wake word and command, triggering the robot to rotate in place scanning for the user’s hand gesture. Upon detecting a Thumbs Up, the robot calibrates the user’s distance using stereo depth, then navigates forward with lateral-shift obstacle avoidance. We also resolved the voice module I2C issue caused by a firmware reflash by analyzing the firmware source code and reverting to the original firmware. A 25-test verification plan mapped to our five use-case requirements has been compiled.
System Design & Changes
We added a SCANNING state to the state machine and used direct wheel control (SetSpeed) to bypass velocity ramping for smooth rotation. We decoupled voice and gesture activation using a dedicated ROS2 topic (/voice/start_scan) to avoid race conditions during node startup. The ToF node now uses strict four-field validation to filter out EMI-corrupted serial data. Use-case requirements were rewritten to be more user-focused based on professor feedback.
Risk & Mitigation
The front ToF sensor occasionally reads false low values, possibly due to chassis obstruction, which we need to verify by checking the mounting position. Serial data corruption from motor EMI is handled by validation but still causes occasional data gaps. The current robot navigation speed is set conservatively low to ensure reliability during development; we plan to increase the speed next week and evaluate whether obstacle avoidance and distance tracking remain accurate at higher speeds.
Next Week’s Plan
We will continue to validate all verification tests and collect more quantitative results for the final demo. We also plan to increase the robot’s movement speed and conduct more user experience testing to evaluate whether the system feels responsive and intuitive in a realistic dorm setting.