What I personally accomplished this week:
This week, I coordinated with justin about the robotics kit/chassis, optical sensor solution, and delved farther into potential depth implementations. As Justin’s report said, we have looked at multiple different chassis. Our current frontrunner is linked below, with our only potential reason for using it either being power consumption or mounting other components, which require more work on my end. I have yet to find any evidence that treads would cause enough vibrations to disrupt proper odometry.
We also decided on our optical sensor solution, the Sparkfun PAA5160E1. Below is a brief showcase of it. After reading datasheets and looking at projects that have used it, I believe that it will work for our positioning needs, given that we are using flat surfaces.
As the ECE parts list opened up, I identified potential alternate solutions for distance estimation. The most desirable one is the Intel Realsense Depth Camera D455. It would provide much more accurate depth than our currently planned bounding box estimation. However, we are worried about CPU overhead, as it would mean that both a camera feed and depth map are being input, so this would only be implemented if we have the overhead. Below is a video that I found helpful for understanding how we would use it.
The second potential depth-sensing camera is the eYs3D Stereo Camera – EX8036. It appears to be a slightly worse option than the Realsense in terms of actual hardware and ease of integration.
Finally, a couple of hours were dedicated to rehearsing the Proposal Presentation.
Progress relative to schedule:
I feel that I am on schedule for everything except for deciding on our battery to meet our design requirement of the system lasting for more than 30 minutes. I am behind on this and expect to address this by finishing it on 2/8/26.
Deliverables for next week:
1.Finish finding battery for vehicle.
2. Investigate any potential issues with part selections to confirm choices.
3. Create a basic CAD model of entire vehicle
4. Begin preliminary work of software construction for path creation.