For the first half of this week, I managed purchase and rental requests for equipment for our project from ECE Receiving. We initially put in a request for the Intel RealSense l515, but in order to let other teams use the equipment in the interest of fairness, we ended up purchasing the Oak D Short Range camera, which arrived yesterday. Before the new camera came, I spent most of my time doing in-depth research and making an onboarding plan to start using the camera, which included finding setup instructions and finding specific tutorials and examples to start depth perception. In addition, I started research on translating our camera output (coordinates, depth) into kinematic motion and instructions to the arm. This involved preliminary research on kinematics. The second task I did while my teammates were doing CAD design was start putting together our design review presentation. I incorporated ideas and got inspiration from previous projects in determining what to include.
Once the camera came, I briefly started the onboarding process, installing packages and getting acquainted with the software. The camera has a depthai-viewer, which is a GUI interface for viewing the output of the camera, with a preinstalled neural network. The output is shown below:
Since the camera came recently and I have spent the majority of my time on the presentation, I am a little behind on playing around with the camera. To catch up to the project schedule, I believe without the task of preparing the presentation, I should be able to dedicate most of my time towards catching up.
Next week, I hope to complete the deliverables of working together with Hayden to establish the embedded software side of the kinematics. In addition, I hope to be able to output coordinates and a depth and finalize the nominal interface between the camera and the robotic arm.