This week, I focused on integrating the robot platform with the vision pipeline on the Raspberry Pi. A significant portion of time was spent dealing with system-level issues, particularly version mismatches across drivers, camera libraries, and dependencies required to interface both the camera and the robot base. These compatibility issues made the setup more time-consuming than expected and required debugging at the OS and library level to ensure all components could work together properly.
In parallel, I worked on improving the depth estimation component using disparity maps from the stereo camera. I experimented with generating and refining disparity outputs to better capture relative depth differences in the scene, as shown in the attached results. This helps provide more stable distance estimation compared to simpler heuristics, especially in cluttered environments. My progress is slightly behind schedule due to the integration overhead, but resolving these system issues is critical for enabling full pipeline testing. Next week, I plan to complete the integration and begin testing the combined perception and control loop on hardware.