Team Status Report for 4/25/26
This week, other than completing the final presentation, we all had exams to prepare for and other work that made us unable to make much progress. We plan to make a final sprint next week when we can devote all our time and focus to this class.
Tyler’s Status Report for 4/25/26
This week, I didn’t have much time to work on this project due to exams in other classes. I spent a little bit of time diagnosing one of the rover’s overheating problems and pinned it down to another bad sonar module. Once my finals are done, I’ll be spending time finishing up the movement fine tuning/testing of the swarm.
Jacob’s Status Report for 4/25/26
Other than reviewing the final presentation slides, I have not done much. I spent an extreme amount of time grading for another class this week.
I will have more time next week as I only have one final to worry about.
Isaac’s Status Report for 4/25/26
This week I spent most of my time preparing for the final presentation.
I am still working with obstacle maneuvering for our rovers. Right now we have the logic for avoiding the obstacle, but we still need to integrate it with continuing on the search pattern after the obstacle has been avoided. After we have the rovers successfully partitioning the space and going on the search patterns, I hope to have obstacle handling in place as well.
As final demo approaches, I hope to have our subsystems successfully integrated and unexpected errors debugged.
Isaac’s Status Report for 4/18/26
This week I spent most of my time working on the basic wandering algorithm and building the other rovers. Some of the movements in wandering have the correct directions, but there seems to be some slipping on the wheels that takes them off-course. I am looking into some options that could increase the traction on the wheels for more accurate movements.
I am currently also working on obstacle maneuvering, but it is not the top priority since I am working on fixing some of the wiring on the third rover. Some of the parts are also overheating substantially, and we hope to fix those errors and then integrating the base algorithms we have in the following week.
Jacob’s Status Report for 4/18/26
This week, I worked on troubleshooting/debugging the vehicles as we modified them to fit in 3D printed cases. The main issue was that many wires disconnected in the process and needed reconnected, but this is difficult within the case. I also spent a significant amount of time debugging for the ultrasonic sensors. One issue was that one of the sensors had gone bad, and replacing it worked. Another issue was that one of the pins on one of the vehicles was no longer working properly to output the ultrasonic trigger signal. Switching to a different pin worked. I was also looking an issue with one of our vehicles. It seems to overheat then restart every once in a while. We haven’t figured out what is happening there yet.
Team Status Report for 4/18/26
This week, we worked on integrating all components and the 3D printed cases. We now have 2 fully functional vehicles and one with some issues. The one with issues works for a while then restarts itself and has sometimes seemed to overheat. We are looking into the wiring and switching out components for backups to try to solve the issue. Other than that, we have been working on getting movement solid by tuning the PID motor controls. We also have basic target detection, so we have a basic wander and detect framework in place. We plan to add a lot more complexity and robustness over the next few days as we approach the final demo.
Tyler’s Status Report for 4/18/26
These past two weeks, I have 3D modeled and printed the cases for the vehicles and target for the camera to detect. I’ve worked on getting a final version of the operating system with the cv2 library included and all the systemctl scripts in place. Most of the time was spent fitting everything into the cases and fixing hardware issues that arose when reconstructing the cars in the cases. I also worked on refining the camera system to work with the new target using more advanced cv2 techniques to reduce noise, amplify the real color, and detect circles.
Team Status Report for 4/4/26
This week, the team worked on preparing for the interim demos and continued work on vehicle movement. This involved updates to the PID controller code so it could be better integrated with the other tasks for the vehicle such as reading UART messages. We are also working around issues with connecting to the Raspberry Pi’s.
Based on feedback from the interim demo, we plan on designing a 3D print to contain the wiring and sensors for the project.
Next week, we plan on further improving vehicle movement and working on algorithms for searching and path planning. We are also looking into using an ultrasonic sensor instead of an IR sensor for obstacle avoidance because the IR sensor functionality can depend on the (light) environment.
For the verification and validation phase of the project, we haven’t run any major tests yet but have a fleet of various test planned. Primarily, we will be testing for whether the bots can find and converge to a target. Secondarily, we want to see a speedup in time to find the target when more bots are searching. So, we will create a test matrix where a room is searched with 1, 2, and 3 bots. We will also vary the amount and spacing of cardboard box obstacles in the room, running each configuration once for each number of bots. We will check for successful completion of the search and make sure that the time decreases with number of bots used.