Keshav Sangam’s Status Report for 4/10

This week, I focused on preparing for the demo and starting to explore OpenCV with ROS. The basic architecture of how we plan on using webcams to detect beacons is to create an OpenCV based ROS package. This takes in webcam input, feeds it through a beacon detection algorithm, and estimates the pose and distance for a detected beacon. From here, we then use ROS python libraries to publish to a ROS topic detailing the estimated offset of the beacon from the robot’s current position. Finally, we can detect visualize the beacon within ROS, and can thus inform our pathplanning algorithm. We are working on camera calibration and the beacon detection algorithm, and we plan to be able to get the estimated pose/distance of the beacon by the end of the week.