We think the most significant risk is our time management. According to our original schedule, we should have finished all the setup by this week, but since we need to order materials first, we couldn’t catch up our original schedule. Therefore, this would result in cutting the time we have for later tasks, most likely testing. However, testing is crucial to ensure the functionality of our product, so this is something we should be careful of, trying to leave substantial testing time even though we are currently behind our schedule. We currently decide to make the change of cutting one week of testing time, leaving two weeks for it, but if we fall further behind, we should aim for getting previous things done faster instead of further cutting the testing time.
In addition to schedule concerns, another important risk is system performance and reliability once the hardware arrives. Our project depends on real-time person detection and stable motion control on a Raspberry Pi, which may be computationally constrained. To manage this risk, we have already analyzed camera requirements and processing needs in advance, and we plan to begin early benchmarking as soon as setup is complete. If performance proves insufficient, we are prepared to optimize the vision pipeline or simplify the tracking algorithm as a contingency.
We presented our proposal on Monday, and received some feedback about our product. Based on the feedback, we decide that our current technical design should be able to work for the most part, but we make a minor change where we want to further specify the height of the basket on our SafeFollow robot to be around 1m, so that it is convenient for elderly to grab items from it. The cost remains the same despite this change, as there’s not really any structural change to it or any additional items required.
Our updated schedule:
