In the beginning of the week, I spent time with my team to finalize our design presentation and make any changes required for the presentation. Once we completed the work required for the design presentation, I began working on our path planning algorithim. I wrote up sudo code for our lawn mowing algorithim and the various states we will have in our drone. The next step would be to write the code out in Arduino. In order to do this, I need to first get a good understanding of the hardware parts we have and understand how to interface with them. I began by looking into how to interface with our radio and wrote up basic tests benches in Arduio that I can use to verify my knowledge and set up the radio correctly once it arrives.
I also began looking into how the altimeter and the GPS will send signals to the arduiono board. For path planning, we need to make use of these signals to determine the drones current position and determine its next step. I wrote up some basic test benches to verify these components once they arrive in our order.
On the computer vision front of the project, we ordered the various parts required for testing. Once I get a hold of a testing carmera and the testing balloons, I plan to set up a testing structure to test the accuracy of the trained model and verify that it can detect the balloon up to 20ft. I will do this by setting up a camera to a stand, and using a tape measure to walk back 20ft away from the camera. Then, we can position the balloon in various places of the frame to make sure it is able to detect it. We can also place other random objects in view to make sure the model would accurately ignore them.