Due to shipping delays, I was unable to get the UWB’s in time to work on them over spring break. Instead, alongside the design report due last week, I worked on assembling one of the rovers and on OS duplication. Starting a new car once one is created should be very simple. Now we can focus all our efforts on testing one car and using other communication modules to test it, knowing that the behavior of one car can easily be ported to another. Much less was done over this period week than I hoped due to the UWB’s arriving late. We hoped to have the comms done by today, so we will have to push that to next week. Although we are behind schedule, if I can get basic communication and the initialization communication protocol done by next week I’ll be back on track and even slightly ahead of schedule.
Tyler’s Status Report for 2/21/26
This week, I worked on setting up the raspi environment with settings and libraries. I chose to flash them with Ubuntu rather than RaspiOS to minimize overhead. I set up a system of running a python script upon booting up for the entry point of our system. I also wrote a python test script to test driving GPIO and I2C signals from python. I started writing some of the logic for space parametrization and segmentation, although I didn’t move it to run on the Pi’s yet. Next week we should be receiving the cars and UWB modules. I want to get basic measurements and comms over the UWB running next week.
Team Status Report for 2/14/26
This week, we made a big change to our project. Due to new restrictions on purchasing drones and drone parts, we eventually concluded that using drones was not feasible. Drones that satisfied our requirements were either too expensive or were manufactured in places we could not order from. So, due to budget constraints, we transitioned to a land-based plan with rovers.
This change came with a lot of scrapping work from the last weeks and planning new hardware to order. Luckily, most of the changes were in the hardware, as our software designs can stay mostly the same regardless of vehicle type. We have decided on a rover kit to use for the vehicles, which will be much cheaper than drones per vehicle, likely allowing us to end up with a larger overall swarm. We’ve also made the choices for everything we need to order and will be placing orders next week. Delivery times for these parts are much shorter.
Our general software design plans are made, and we are ready to start implementing software onto our raspberry pi’s next week. Our next milestone is to have two pi’s communicate and agree on a coordinate space using uwb and each pi’s relative position.
Tyler’s Status Report for 2/14/26
This week, due to our change in plans from drone swarm to rover swarm, I worked on transitioning our preexisting software plans to land-based plans, as well as making the actual control flow diagram for the software.
I separated the logic into an initialization phase, a wandering phase, and a target found/convergence phase. I broke each of these down into different individual actions and communication steps that need to happen as well as writing out descriptions for each step. These descriptions will help us with abstraction so we can focus on coding one task at a time. Descriptions will also help when explaining the control loop to classmates during the design presentation.
A big part of this week was spent researching trade-offs between drones and rovers and hardware for each, eventually culminating in our decision to switch to rovers. Luckily, most of our communication protocols and algorithms were independent of the vehicles used, so we were able to keep most of what we already had planned.
Team Status Report for 2/7/26
This week, we finalized our choices of hardware and researched how to connect the autonomous flight software to the flight controller. We made some changes to our plan to accommodate the constraints that come from prices and to incorporate an optical flow sensor for better position measurements. In the next week, since we don’t have physical parts yet, we will work on simulating pathfinding for the autonomous flight component.
Delivery times are longer than first expected, which is a risk to our schedule. We hope to remedy this by putting more work into simulations early so everything is ready for the drones once they’re built.
Tyler’s Status Report for 2/7/26
This week, I worked on finalizing the choices of flight controller/ESC stack and finding documentation and DIY projects that make use them. I found information on flashing to the flight controller and how to write target positions using remote controls, and made a plan on how to switch that communication to happen over UART from the raspberry pi.