This week, we mainly focused on finishing our design report and assembling the first rover as a group. Due to shipping delays, we couldn’t get the UWB’s to work on them over spring break. Since communications was our next task, this did set us back and we will have to do more next week to catch up. We now have our first rover built and ready for applying our algorithms, so next week we will handle basic movement of the rover and communication between the rover and a test RasPi over UWB. We hope to have basic movement, coordinate calibration, and space parameterization/segmentation done by the end of next week.
Our product solution will fit the project needs with considerations of global, cultural, and environmental factors in the following ways:
Part A: Global Factors
With regards to global factors, we seek for our solution to work regardless of the technical education of operators. Due to our project’s autonomous nature, it would not take a highly skilled individual to deploy our rovers. Additionally, our solution doesn’t require any infrastructure to be used in a new areas around the world. They are able to be brought to a site and deployed instantly and will coordinate themselves regardless of how they are set up with no need for a programmer or engineer on site. In this way, the global issue of education inequalities will not be a barrier of use.
In addition to education inequality, our solution also keeps in mind global financial inequality. We sought to make our solution affordable. With each unit under $100, this technology is not expensive to acquire, allowing for large swarm sizes at low costs.
Part B: Cultural Factors
Cultural factors play a significant role in how our solution will be used and perceived. A major difference from traditional search and rescue is that our solution uses autonomous vehicles rather than human responders. It is important that our solution is very simple to set up and use so that any community could incorporate our solution, no matter what technical background or infrastructure. Additionally, many cultures have concerns about flying drones regarding safety and privacy. The use of ground-based vehicles reduces these concerns so more cultures would be open to adopting the solution.
Part C: Environmental Factors
Our solution is designed to minimize the environmental impact of search and rescue operations. We use small, battery-powered robots to search. The lightweight frames allow the vehicles to be more power-efficient and also have the benefit of disturbing the environment (soil) less than larger search options like ATVs. Additionally, our solution does not require installation or maintenance of any infrastructure in the search area, so this reduces the direct impact of our solution on the environments it is used in. This is especially important for sensitive or protected environments like national parks.
A was written by Tyler Weed, B was written by Isaac, and C was written by Jacob.