Aditya Ranade
- What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week.
This week, Akshat and I found the bug in frontier exploration which did not appear in simulation. The issue was the robot would sometimes execute an older trajectory instead of the current one. We found that this was due to a concurrency issue in which the path was beginning to execute right before the trajectory was received. Now, exploration works very robustly.
- Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
We are on schedule currently. The thermal camera has been integrated into exploration and detects people in periodic intervals. Frontier exploration is also giving us good results with about 8/10 runs succeeding in testing.
- What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
I plan on spending time next week to speed up our computation times so we can reduce the total time taken by the robot to cover the entire map.
Akshat Jain
- What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week.
This week, I helped Aditya fix the concurrency bug that we were facing last week which was due to the robot trying to execute a previous path before it received the complete trajectory. I also worked on the final presentation as well as getting data from testing to include in our slides.
- Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
Frontier exploration has started working much better and executes correctly without collisions in our test areas most of the time. The robot gets quite slow when it is requesting a new path and we are hoping to reduce the computation time.
- What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
We hope to reduce computation times as well as thoroughly test our thermal camera in multiple environments by the end of next week.
Wenxin Xiao
- What did you personally accomplish this week on the project? Give files or photos that demonstrate your progress. Prove to the reader that you put sufficient effort into the project over the course of the week.
This week I successfully integrated thermal camera to robot exploration with help from Aditya and Akshat. I also worked on the final presentation and tested the robot in apartment hallways and dining room with teammates. Due to the limited range in which thermal camera can successfully identify humans, we changed our algorithm so that the lidar rotates every few seconds to scan the surrounding area for human. The updated logic is that the thermal camera consistently checks for image temperature and once a block of image beyond preset threshold temperature was observed it signals the lidar. The lidar contains information of the obstacle observed and we can calculate the distance and angle of the person observed from the position of the robot and mark it on a map.
- Is your progress on schedule or behind? If you are behind, what actions will be taken to catch up to the project schedule?
We are currently on schedule. The concurrency issue causing the robot to execute old trajectories repeatedly was fixed and we successfully integrated thermal camera into robot exploration.
- What deliverables do you hope to complete in the next week?
We hope to test our thermal camera thoroughly in multiple environments by the end of next week. If time permits, we hope to speed up computation times and retest on multiple environments.
TEAM UPDATE
This week, we fully integrated human detection and frontier exploration subsystems. The robot periodically rotates during exploration to scan for humans in its vicinity. We use LIDAR data along with the thermal camera reading to interpolate where a human is located. The equations can be found in our presentation.
We also worked on testing both systems in the corridor of our apartment building and a portion of our apartment. We recorded preliminary test results for the final presentation.