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Team Status Report for 2/21/26

This week we had our Design Presentation including our changes from drones to rovers, and following discussions with E6 to clearly differentiate the scope of our use-case requirements. The result of our discussions was that the scope of our project is ‘outdoor search and converge,’ and for E6 it is ‘indoor search and return.’ We received advice from Professor Tamal Mukherjee on this matter and we are looking to communicate with E6 to prevent further overlap and component ordering.

This week we finalized our Hardware and Software systems architecture. We decided to implement our localization by triangulating three single-antenna UWBs for an anchor-less local coordinate system to fulfill our scalability reach requirement. We also decided to implement our convergence with the Marco-Polo method to find the vectors that minimize the rovers’ distance to the target. We have a single PDoA-enabled UWB as our backup plan, but the cost of $250 makes it a less favorable option and we are confident that distance minimization is a better fit for our project.

We put in our first orders for the hardware. While we are waiting for them, we began setting up our Raspberry Pi environments and started on our software modules in parallel. In the following week we are looking to make some decisions in testing environment while we build our rovers and and begin software implementation with sensors.

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Isaac’s Status Report for 2/21/26

This week we had Jacob’s design presentation so we prepared the slides together. Besides the Design Presentation, I worked mostly on researching parts and putting in the orders. Once they arrive, I will assemble them so that Jacob and Tyler can integrate them with the sensors and Pi setups. I also started writing Python code for motor movement, and that should be ready for Tyler’s Pi setup and Jacob’s sensor integration in the following week.

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Isaac’s Status Report for 2/14/26

This week, as we made the decision on switching our project from drones to rovers, I mainly focused on moving our hardware systems from air to ground. I have been looking for components, and one of the major decisions we made was choosing to use ultra wide band sensors and motor encoders for localization. I have been establishing SPI communications on the Pis.  I am also drafting some Kalman filters and Python wrappers. We are currently waiting for UWBs and rovers, so once we have them I will be able to test our setup and work on integration. I am slightly behind schedule as we are making big changes due to unexpected circumstances, but the general schematic remains fairly similar so the shift should not put us too behind once we have the components delivered.

 

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Isaac’s Status Report 2/7/26

This week I decided on the sensors we needed for our use case requirements. I searched for budget-friendly camera, gps and transceivers that match the specs we needed, mainly our weight requirements. I also decided on the optical flow sensor and the height sensor that can assist our photogrammetry processing.