This week, I completed three interim demo sessions with Xinyu, showing our current progress of completed vision pipeline and motor controller subsystems. Also, since we currently lack the batteries to proceed to the testing of our integration of vision pipeline and the motor controller subsystem, I continued to write more extensive local software tests to test whether the motor controller code performs logically in different states (Emergency stop / Following / Searching). Hopefully, these tests would ensure that we would experience less bugs in integration.
We are a bit behind our schedule due to the lack of batteries. However, the batteries will arrive by next Monday, which will enable us to work on the integration by then. To recover for this issue, we are both writing more local tests to ensure that our integration step goes more smoothly. We will also try to get the integration step before Spring Carnival next week, ensuring that we get it done before we go on the vacation. Our deliverable for next week is therefore going to be an integrated system of the vision pipeline and the motor controller system. Hopefully, our robot could move as expected in basic scenarios driven by the vision pipeline.
Additional section: As mentioned above, I already wrote and ran extensive tests on my motor controller subsystem to verify its logic. Also, I already did some basic manual tests weeks ago when our batteries were previously working, where I verified that manually outputting the Json commands output like I have now can actually drive the robots to move in the expected ways. Later, I will add more tests on top of what I currently have to verify that the emergency stop logic (ultrasonic sensor system) works as intended in even edge cases. I’ll also write tests after integration of the vision pipeline and the motor controller subsystem.