What are the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project? How are these risks being managed? What contingency plans are ready?
This week, we learnt from the Professor that it would be better if we create our own dataset. In this way, our robot would perfectly interact with our physical system and we wouldn’t have to worry about fitting our physical system to that which was experimented on in the studies that produced the existing datasets we found. This was the biggest change in direction for us. While we were optimistic about being able to acquire HVAC ducts from trade school, we realized that this would take a while. One of our risks will be getting a good test system set up in order to collect our audio data. Some of the current risks we face are getting metal ducts for us to run our testing on and creating damage on the ducts that are akin to damages you would see in real life. To mitigate this, Adithi has contacted a civil engineering friend with access to metal ducts as prices online are too expensive and above our budget. We have also found various papers with set methods on how to create standard defects.
Another risk we face at the moment is making sure our Jetson Nano has enough power from our battery. To mitigate this risk as of now, we have made sure to include a DC converter which can get up to 19V to power our Jetson.
Lastly, none of us are very familiar with testing procedures and to mitigate this being a problem later on in our project, we plan to read papers on testing and ask for professor guidance to mitigate this risk.
Were any changes made to the existing design of the system (requirements, block diagram, system spec, etc)? Why was this change necessary, what costs does the change incur, and how will these costs be mitigated going forward?
After researching and finding different solutions, we have settled on using a Behringer UM2 USB Audio interface which can act as the USB audio interface for capturing contact sensor signals. We found that this works with Jetson’s USB to capture analog vibration signals. We also settled on using a basic piezo element diaphragm which will serve as a piezo sensor detecting the taps against the HVAC duct. This change comes with the fact that AE sensors are expensive and out of our budget. Upon further research we have found that using the two components mentioned earlier will give us good data and results, while letting us stay under our $600 budget.
We have also decided we need to build our own dataset, as recommended by our professor so we will now have to process and document our data to create our own library. This will come with the challenge of creating defects in our HVAC and collecting and documenting the data for this.
Provide an updated schedule if changes have occurred.
Our schedule remains almost the same except for the fact that building our HVAC system has been moved up to the following next 2 weeks. This will be done in conjunction with what we had originally planned to do for the week. It will be a hectic 2 weeks managing hardware and software as well as building our HVAC testing and audio collection system but if we do this, testing and demo set up will be a lot easier. We have to build our system now since we will be collecting our own data rather than using a provided dataset from a research paper.