This week I finished the plan for all of the point-to-point soldering that needed to be done between the board mounted on the front of the robot and the board mounted on the center of the robot, as well as all of the motor and power connections from the battery. We hadn’t realized how much planning it would to connect the boards in a way that would physically work when everything was actually in the housing, so this task took longer than expected. It took about a day for me to complete all of this soldering, but when it was done I was able to confirm that all of the peripherals were properly connected and working by running our code on the ESP32S3. We still need to repeat the process for an additional bot.
I also worked with Josh to make some modifications to the physical housing that were necessary in order for the boards to sit properly in the housing post-wiring. At this point, the design of the physical housing should be completely done, and we are currently waiting for the print to finish and should have it by tomorrow morning assuming the print goes smoothly. Lastly, I modified the code for streaming camera video from a catombot so that it can now be toggled remotely via a ros topic, which Adrian has integrated into the UI. We can now enable and disable camera streaming to the UI so the operator can see exactly what the robot is seeing.
Overall, the group’s progress as a whole is a bit behind as creating the physical housing has taken much longer than expected. Therefore, I have been trying to work on tasks that don’t require the physical housing to be done, but most of the integration, motor control, and robot control has been blocked by this stage. In order to catch up, Adrian and I will meet tomorrow to pick up the finished housing ASAP to test the software we have been building (autonomous search algorithm, UWB locationing and UI display, etc) as well as completing the motor control. If the autonomous searching is giving us difficulty, then we will instead spend our time implementing direct tele-operations for controlling the robot’s movements for the purpose of the final presentation.
For the final demo, we will need to build and solder another set of components for a second robot , and will need to make sure autonomous searching is functional as well. Since I was the one to plan and solder the last robot, I will be the one to do the second one. So, assembling the second robot will be my first focus, and when done Adrian and I will be working closely together on all of the software to ensure we have a working multirobot system with autonomous searching that displays robot position and sensor data to the user.