Accomplishments
This week, one of the big deliverables my team and I worked on was our design report. I was mainly responsible for explaining hardware and system design, design choices, design requirements, and the diagrams involved. I was also ultimately put in charge of formatting. The design report allowed us to finalize designs, explain trade offs and choices, and give readers an understanding of what our HVAC robot does.
Outside of this, I was able to refine the code for our robot’s motors, including the use of the motor driver we ordered and pushed this to the Github repository our team now has. I also found an online open source repo which I was referencing since I decided it would be better to use ROS1 for now and then move to using ROS2 once our robot does simple solenoid tapping and moves. Based on my research, NVIDIA is pushing towards ROS2 and it will be better long term, but since we are still prototyping, I will start with ROS1 and move to using ROS2.
I also went to a trade school to acquire the HVAC ducts. For now, we got sections of HVAC ducts that are not damaged. I will be going to the Junkyard to get metal scraps, and am aiming to follow up with Techspark and the Civil Engineering Department to get metal scraps that are rusted or have defects like cracks. I can also manually make sustained cracks on the metal we have so we will first be collecting metal sound data on healthy data. I have tried collecting data with a mic and will get this to Rayann and Mahati for the signal processing.
Resources for motor control and robot chassis and code:
- https://www.dfrobot.com/product-1860.html?srsltid=AfmBOornjmDRtYwUMkuKqLNi2cdcR3aubl-bh9vYVKoqg8luHyFGaepQ
- https://github.com/estods3/JetTank
Schedule
I am on schedule now and currently on track. Our parts just arrived so I have compensated by writing the initial code and am confident going into next week to test out our design. My partners are also working on the ML model and our professor is confident in our progress.
Next Week
Next week, I plan to take the parts we receive to build the initial robot chassis and have motor control. I will also put the solenoid tapper together and figure out how to make our robot chassis remote controlled. Before the remote controlled part, we will control the motor movement using our MCU and IMU. I also plan to begin testing simple connections with the solenoid tapper which will help me decide if these parts work well. I will go and collect damaged panels to put inside our ducts. One of the things we need to figure out is what our interim and final demos will look like, and I will begin writing code to integrate all our parts together: the solenoid tapper system, the camera, and motor control. I will also begin research into a remote so that the robot can be controlled by a remote control rather than on a laptop.