This week I spent a good amount of time working on the odometry sensor. It was reading about 90 degrees off from where it should have been, which was causing some issues with how the robot understood its own orientation. I went through the recalibration process to get it lined up correctly so that the heading data coming from the sensor actually matched the real world. Once that was sorted out, I also worked on calibrating the motors. The drive behavior was not quite where it needed to be, so I made some adjustments to get the left and right motors responding more consistently and accurately to velocity commands.
On top of that, I made some changes to the local costmap configuration. Specifically, I increased the inflation radius so that obstacles get bigger bubbles around them during path planning. This should help the robot keep a safer distance from walls and objects instead of trying to squeeze through tight gaps. I also took some time this week to test out the pan tilt system, running it through its range of motion and making sure it was tracking and responding properly. Overall it was a productive week focused on tightening up a lot of the core subsystems on the robot.
A lot of what I have been learning this semester has come from a mix of self teaching and prior experience. For the SLAM side of things, I learned how to use Google Cartographer by watching videos and reading articles online, working through tutorials and documentation to understand how it processes lidar data and builds occupancy grid maps. It took some time to get comfortable with how all the parameters and configuration files work together, but the online resources were really helpful in getting me up to speed. On the FPGA side, a lot of that knowledge came from a previous internship where I got hands on experience working with FPGA development tools and hardware design workflows. That background has been really valuable for this project, especially when it comes to working with the Kria board and understanding how to integrate hardware accelerated components into the overall system.