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.