This week I was the one to give the final presentation for our project. I also worked with my other group mates to finish assembling the final rendition of a catombot once Josh’s final print had finished. Last Sunday, we found that the initial design of the gears required too much torque for the motors to move themselves, but Josh was able to quickly redesign them which ended up being successful. Once we determined that the new gear design was working, I implemented code for tele-operating the motors via commands on a ROS topic. Essentially, the robot subscribes to a velocity ROS topic to which the base station can publish commands that the robot will use to drive the motors. Adrian was able to add functionality to the UI where a user’s arrow key inputs result in the corresponding velocity commands being published to the ROS topic. So, we essentially can now fully tele-operate each catombot.
Our progress is definitely behind at the moment as we approach the deadlines for submitting our final poster and final report, as well as preparing for the demo. We still need to print the housing for another robot as well as solder all the necessary electrical connections so that we can have at least two robots for the demo. Additionally, we still need to get the robot running the autonomous search algorithm, translating search outputs to motor movements, and then test autonomous searching. After this, we also need to refactor some code in the UI and in UWB communication to allow for multiple robots to be used by the system, as our previous work has all been done in order to just get a single robot working.
In the next week, my job will be to fully solder all the electrical connections for a second bot and get UWB locationing and two way ranging working in the context of two robots who are initiators, who will need to both be able to communicate with each anchor as well as the survivor tag. Finally, I will work with the other group members to finalize integration of the system and to finish the poster board, final report, etc.