For this week and last week, I have worked on the three main behaviors for the robotic arm and tuning them. The three main behaviors are handling raw meats, flipping half-cooked meats, and handling done meats. Since those three functions can work for one piece of meat, I have created the part of the software controller and integration where these events can be put into a queue system. We will soon test on a real grill and meats. I will also have to take videos of each action for the video. I also ordered a DC power supply that can turn an AC input into a DC input of 12 V and a maximum of 20 A. This will help to provide the robot with a consistent current draw and avoid electronics from browning out. I have also presented the final presentation, which I think went pretty smoothly.
Team Status Report for 4/30
Jasper is working from home on the poster because he is still down with a Covid-related illness.
Raymond and Joseph are both working in the lab in person to integrate all subsystems together and to test the integrated system. Progress still needs to be made before final video and final demo day. Specifically, new realities about the demo location and feedback from the final presentation necessitated some changes to our design.
We hope to get one meat case done and filmable by May 4.
Jasper Lessiohadi’s Report for 4/30
This week, since our project is pretty much done, I worked on the poster. It is looking pretty good at the moment, and I will only have to make some small changes for it to be ready.
Raymond Ngo’s status Report 4/30
Slower week work-wise, more focused on final testing and final presentation. Unfortunately, we have been slipping behind compared to the schedule due to last second last minute changes that arose due to the difficulty in integration and the environment. For example, we spent time looking at grills with flat bottoms after feedback, we looked at different types of grills (or whether we should use a grill at all), we looked at different power supplies due to the demo environment.
For my part, a lot of the week was spent on integrating the robotic arm with the computer vision, which required a lot of discussions with Joe and a lot of trial and error. I also completed the battery of tests, but have not done integrated testing with all components working together.
Jasper Lessiohadi’s Status Report for 4/23
This week I was not able to do much because I got Covid and most of what I needed to do had to be in person in the lab. Luckily the rest of my team was able to pick up the slack and integrated together several parts of our project. What I did do, though, was start work on the slides for our final presentation. We have made good progress towards them and we will put on the finishing touches tomorrow.
Team Status Report for 4/23
This week, the team ran into a few roadblocks. Jasper got covid, making it difficult to integrate all the parts together, and the Jetson Xavier we were using decided to break down. Fortunately, after a few days, we were able to flash the Xavier and get it up and running again. We lost a bit of progress, but we made up for it over the course of the week. Additionally, despite some difficulties, we were able to integrate the Computer Vision algorithm to detect meat and the UI together successfully. The Inverse Kinematics for the robotic arm are also going well, allowing the arm to move with the desired range of motion. Finally, the team has been making good headway regarding preparing the slides for the final demo.
We are now working on more extensive testing to make sure all the parts are working as smoothly as planned. As was expected, some aspects are not quite as polished as we would like for the final product, but that was something we planned and made time for in our schedule. We are currently right on track with where we need to be and we are optimistic about our project as a whole.
Raymond’s Status Report 4/23
Unfortunately, Jasper was out this week due to covid, but with his input the integration between the UI and the Computer Vision, as well as the integration between the Computer Vision and the Cooking Timer, is complete. The progress we hope to make was delayed several days for integration because the Xaiver broke halfway into the week, requiring several days and a reflash to fix. As a result of that, some progress was lost, but that loss in progress has been reversed with more work.
Furthermore, testing has begun for my computer vision modules for the final presentation. Most of the metrics seem to be fine, however the edge detection might be a bit off in terms of its predictions, probably due to camera quality factors that are hard to resolve. This is unfortunately one tradeoff that cannot be avoided since OpenCV has a max resolution, and any increases in resolution for the image severly impacts negatively everything else in the cv pipeline. Solution is to increase brightness even more, since there is only so much an edge detection algorithm can do when noise is present.
Jasper Lessiohadi’s Status Report for 4/16
This week, tried to get all the major components of our project integrated together. We were able to get the Jetson Xavier up and running with the blob detection and UI running separately, but we had trouble putting the two together. For some reason, we were able to share our internet via ethernet cable early on in this process, but it suddenly stopped working. Because of this we were unable to actually put everything together. We ended up being able to connect to the internet through the CMU wifi router (again using an ethernet cable), but since it was so late in the week, I did not have time to come in and put it together. I plan to do this next week, as I will have much more time to come in and do work. Besides that, I have everything set up on the UI side of things, so once we have it all combined, we will be in a really good spot.
Raymond’s status report 4/16
I updated my dataset with more images, including hard to find images of arms over the grill, in response to the feedback from the ethics class about potential harm from the project. The newly created network works. Metrics might need to be shifted a bit in the final report, however, since the categories for anything that is not meat is so broad and the dataset is so limited that there will be limits in terms of accuracy. I will see what I can do.
Jasper and I got the ethernet working, however, with the revelation that the final demo will take place in the UC, orders have been placed for both a router and a wifi card. Both orders placed because flexibility in terms of results.
I have begun integration of the cooking time algorithm with computer vision. I will need Jasper to integrate the user interface. Unfortunately, Joseph’s lack of completion of work in time for integration has bottlenecked progress and he will need to step up for my part of the scheduled tasks to be completed.
Jasper Lessiohadi’s Status Report 4/10
For our interim demo last Wednesday, I worked on the UI a bit more. It was not exactly where it needed to be, but I will work on that and integrating all of the pieces of our project in the next few days. Besides that, since we just had Carnival, I have made no other progress.