This week, we delivered our proposal presentation. The feedback we received from the presentation was mostly about the presentation itself, so we didn’t make any change to the design from the feedback. There have been no changes to the requirements of the system; it seems that what we had for the presentation with our initial goals should be valid for the future as well. However, based on input from more experienced roboticists advising us against it for the purposes of the timescale of the semester, we made the difficult decision to abandon the intended Rocker-Bogie Suspension system (pictured below), and switched to a more common, easier to implement and calculate feedback with, four-wheel tank drive.
The biggest risk that we believe right now is the design of the software-side kinematics, in tandem with the hardware. As of current, we have on lend from the ECE department the RealSense L515; despite the initial plan to use the OAK-D SR depth camera. This weekend, before Monday, our goal is to finalize whether or not we will be able to order an OAK-D SR camera. Most likely, we should order one, but we want to make sure that the overall cost of the robot doesn’t get too high, and that we don’t spend all 600 dollars in one shot.
We have not made any changes to our schedule; we are currently on-target based on our initial Gantt chart, but we need to make sure that the design presentation does not impede the flow of work for the rest of the project.