Progress Report
The Kria KR260 was pose detection was made and tested .The detection pipeline was extended to include bounding box aspect ratio analysis for laying down detection, with a refined heuristic combining bbox size, position in frame, and aspect ratio to filter out false positives from partial body detections. On the Pi side, a ROS 2 detection bridge node receives these detections and triggers an espeak voice alarm over a Bluetooth JBL Go 4 speaker when a person is detected on the ground, with a cooldown to prevent alarm spamming.
Motor control was brought online using the Pololu VNH5019 dual motor driver, interfaced directly to the Raspberry Pi 5 GPIO with 8 control pins per the standard INA/INB/PWM/EN configuration. The motor power and logic grounds were verified to be correctly referenced through the shared internal ground plane on the driver board. Nav2 was integrated with the motor control stack, enabling the robot to receive and execute navigation goals. Google Cartographer SLAM was also brought up and is partially functional.
The RPLiDAR serial timeout issue was resolved by replacing the hardware with a new unit, after which the LiDAR, Google Cartographer SLAM, Nav2, and motor control all came together into a functioning navigation stack. The robot is now capable of building a map in real time while navigating autonomously with motor control through the VNH5019 driver. Currently active work is focused on integrating the pan-tilt camera mechanism to enable the robot to track detected persons as it navigates, with the PAA5160E1 optical odometry sensor already running and feeding into Cartographer for improved localization accuracy.