As I was the presenter for our project proposal, prior to Wednesday, I spent this week predominately practicing my presentation and delivery to make sure I wouldn’t forget any pertinent details and would stay on schedule when speaking.
Following the presentation, I started working on some of the basic signals processing considerations for the sensor, attempting to figure out some basic cutoffs for showing sensed objects to the biker and trying to consider what issues might arise. One of the things I foresee might be especially problematic will be filtering out stationary objects.
Further following some comments from the professors and staff, and a small back and forth, the team is looking into other sensor options than the RPLIDAR and we are getting together later today to discuss some of the suggested options. One possible solution, were we to assure we had the budget for it, that I started looking at was using a mix of longer range lidar sensors to first detect the object in certain common look directions and then a set of ultrasonic sensor to give us a more complete FOV if necessary and be able to track when warning lights on the tail mount might interfere with the LIDAR.
Some of my thought process can be seen here: SignalsProcessingSensorConsiderations25SEP