At the beginning of this week, the majority of my work went into preparing the proposal presentation slides and meeting with Hayden to finalize the presentation and offer feedback. Personally, I made the use case and problem description slides as well as created the Gantt chart and inputted the tasks we need to achieve on Asana, our technology of choice.
After the presentation and after reviewing our TA feedback, I started to research the required technologies for my end – the depth camera or a LiDAR camera. Upon discussing with the team, we decided to acquire one of each since the ECE inventory already has a LiDAR camera that we can access without cutting into our budget. I filled out a request with ECE receiving and I hope to receive the camera sometime next week so I can start playing with it. In the meantime, I am researching how to interface with the camera and any needed technologies that are required for it to function properly. Since my area of focus is mostly on software, I am also starting to research how to translate what the camera sees and the information it gathers to the kinematic motion of the arm. This is still very much a work in progress.
Currently, my progress is on schedule since I am waiting for the technologies to arrive before I can actually start digging into experimentation and research.
In the next week, I hope to be able to receive the materials and play around with them. I hope to be able to write extremely basic code for the camera and RPi and perform basic setup tasks for the two so we can establish a good basis for the coming weeks as further experimentation occurs.