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Hayden’s Status Report 3/16/24

This week I made a lot of progress. I spent Friday helping Varun fabricate parts for the robot arm. We should be able to complete the drive train parts in the next few days. I also finished the PCB design and will be able to order it ASAP once I confirm the parts are available on the website. I got a breadboard and tested my code from last week and it works; now that the code works the PCB was designed to work with this code. After we finish fabricating the rover in the next week we will be able to work on the kinematics; I have finished my research for the driving kinematics and I am currently looking into Wi-Fi communication between RPis so I can get that up and running after the rover is built.

Attached are some screenshots of the PCB and the code working for the controller:

This is the breadboard I used to confirm the design.

We are still behind on fabricating the rover, but once we have it created I believe it will be much easier for us to write meaningful code for the kinematics and debug it. We are on track to have a moving rover by the interim demo.

In order for things to be on track I need to purchase the drive train components by Wednesday and have all the other components 3D printed by then as well. I will also order the PCB ASAP because it might take a while to ship. I also need to confirm with other members of the group that we have purchased/acquired the RPis and the monitor to make sure we can get the controller side complete in the next two weeks.

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Nathan’s Status Report for 3/9/24

For the past couple of weeks, the primary focus I had towards our project was twofold: the design report and the camera. A significant part of the week leading up to spring break, around 10-12 hours worth, was spent on the design report. For my sections of the introduction, tradeoffs, testing & verification, and project management, it required a lot of time spent doing research on current statistics about individuals facing mobility challenges as well as existing solutions. Additionally, research was conducted on tradeoffs between Wi-Fi and Bluetooth as well.

For the camera aspect of the project, I read and investigated the source code of the Luxonis camera repository, specifically the depthai-viewer tool. I wanted to see why the rgb capability was possible when using their tool but not when I manually write a pipeline that utilizes it. In addition, I am also investigating an example that utilizes a pointcloud and see what useful data arises there, but the bottleneck still lies with the color camera issue. Because the depthai-viewer registers the cameras as a default stereo pair, it is possible there is a configuration that I am missing.

Now that the design report is complete, which took a majority of my time for the week, I can fully focus my energy on both setting up the Raspberry Pi as well as getting to the bottom of the camera issue. I started booting the Raspberry Pi and setting up SSH, but I accidentally broke the SD card, so progress was temporarily halted on this front. Thus, my progress is slightly behind but I hope to be able to catch up with this narrowing of focus and fixation on my tasks.

In the next week, I hope to successfully setup the Raspberry Pi in a headless fashion, set up SSH on the Pi, and be able to run my tutorial that utilizes the ColorCamera feature on the Oak D SR.

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Hayden’s Status Report 3/09/24

These past two weeks I’ve spent the majority of my time verifying the design and touching up the CAD so we will be able to hit the ground running after Spring Break with fabrication of our rover. I spent probably about 8 hours alone confirming our design and finding sources for our design proposal report. As far as progress, I have not been able to work on the physical fabrication our experimentation parts because I was ill the week prior to Spring Break and then I have been out of town. However, while working on our design report submission I confirmed the ability of our design to drive, lift items properly, and receive data from the encoder on the servos at a high enough rate to have the amount of control we would like.

Additionally, I finally had the time to write some Arduino code and I was able to get the analog button presses to translate to outputs from the Arduino. Here is the basic code I was able to write with the help of one of our design sources.

Looking at the schedule I am pretty much on task as far as design; nevertheless, I am very far behind as far as fabrication. This week Varun and I plan on using the water jet to create our bottom plate and we will be able to keep 3D printing components. Once, we order the final components of the drive train we will be able to assemble the entire rover and the only part we will have left is integration. We were very optimistic in believing that we could fabricate the entire rover before break but now that our design is set in stone I believe we will be able to get caught up in the next two weeks. Kinematics is still in the works and I need to put a lot more effort into the coding aspect of the project now that the CAD is finalized. This next week I will finish the entirety of the 3D printed drive train modules and I will finalize a PCB so I can order one and begin debugging ASAP.

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Team Status Report for 3/09/24

The biggest risk, which I (Varun) only realized while testing, was whether or not the suction cups could even hold up an iPad. Thankfully, that risk was provably mitigated. Currently, the most significant risk is the kinematics. We’ll need to update the previously thought-out kinematics to be slightly more robust (described in our design report). I hope to figure that out this coming week.

We changed the block diagram of our system a bit, to account for said kinematics. We’ll need fast encoder feedback, which can really only be done on bare metal microcontrollers, rather than the OS-stuffed Raspberry Pi 4. We updated our block diagrams to reflect this change. It adds the cost of the Raspberry Pi Pico, which is rather minimal. Varun’s status report has the progress of the suction system!

Part A – Varun: 

Our target demographic is, by design, people who are not technologically savvy. As mentioned many times prior, the inspiration for this project came through Hayden’s grandfather, whose capability to move is rather limited. Also limited is his technological ability. As such, we decided to simplify the control sequence to ensure that people whose technological ability is at the same level can easily use HomeRover. Additionally, the automatic sequence to grab an object is easily reachable by the touch of a button, so users don’t have to spend a lot of time to learn how to use our system. The factor we want to touch is one that is not talked about much, which is recovery. Though recovery is extremely important, it is a part of the process that is hard to suffer through. We aim to ease that suffering just a little bit, with HomeRover.

Part B – Hayden: 
In regards to different cultural factors our design is robust in a manner that does not require a written language. Our control center uses four buttons for controls which will be labeled with arrows and two buttons for interacting. The two buttons will be labeled with icons that can be translated in a user manual to make the design usable by all cultures. The monitor will display when the rover is in the proper range to pickup the item using colors; red and green are seemingly universal for good and bad so we are employing these colors on our display. As far as moral values in religions our design uses ethically sourced materials and we are mitigating waste by using our modular design. As far as traditions and laws, the only groups I can think of that we are violating their beliefs with our design are the Amish and Mennonite communities; these groups are not in our target demographic so our design is sufficient culturally.

Part C – Nathan:

Considering environmental factors, especially when pertaining to our design’s relationship with living organisms and natural resources, we are primarily concerned with the sourcing of our parts. Because our design utilizes LiPo batteries on both the user side and control side, we have to be cognizant on the origins of the lithium, and by extension the cobalt, that goes into these rechargeable batteries. According to Siddharth Kara, “roughly 75 percent of the world’s supply of cobalt is mined in the Congo”, and oftentimes this is by the hands of child labor. If we are not aware of the origins of the cobalt that go into our batteries, we are directly supporting these brutal mining practices that are causing both human and environmental catastrophe through the exploitation and exhaustion of the natural resources of the Congo land. This is an environmental consequence of utmost importance and it will be considered heavily when purchasing the parts for our system.

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Varun’s Status Update for 3/09/24

I was able to finish the CAD for the pumps, which is quite important for the overall project, and a lot more specifically for the design review. I also worked quite a lot this week, indeed, on the design review. I worked on the implementation side of the design review, and was able to individually place screenshots of the work that I did in the design review such that I could describe each system in a more detailed fashion. As such, we ended up being right at the edge of the max quantity of pages, but we should be under the quantity limit for each individual section!

I was also, thankfully, able to work with some physical parts this week. I was able to retrieve most of the electronic guts for the Rover, which will be important as we continue to fabricate it over the next week. The most important mechanism for me to test was the suction mechanism. I wanted to make sure that with the motorized pumps, we would be able to lift our target weight. When I got the pump in the initial part delivery, I found that it could only push air out, not pull air in. After I spent awhile inspecting the inside of the pump, I figured out how I could add a 3D printed part and essentially add a suction input. A picture:

The blue plastic part above is the 3D printed part. Though this did add some suction, it wasn’t nearly enough to hold my iPad, which is our weight goal. I was able to source an original plastic heading for the DC pump that had the suction in-built, and with just two pumps, we were able to lift an iPad, our target weight! The video.

Though this is good, we are still a bit behind on fabrication. We have cut time on other things, such as with the OAK-D SR, which should keep us on track, but we’ll have to put a bit more time this week to meet our fabrication goal. I hope by next week to have the completed Rover; if not, the Robot Arm fabricated.

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Nathan’s Status Report for 2/24/24

For the first half of this week, from Sunday to Wednesday morning, I was practicing my Design Proposal presentation. I wrote down meaningful talking points I wanted to hit on each slide, and then I made sure to get the slide transitions down smoothly and without pausing or awkwardness. In addition, I practiced my timing and in front of a live audience (my roommates). For the latter half of the week, I dove in-depth into the Luxonis DepthAI documentation to try and figure out which frameworks and functions would be useful for our application. I read numerous examples from Luxonis’ depthai-experiments repo to try and find the relevant depth processing we need. Alongside this experimentation, I was figuring out the nuances behind the dependencies needed to install the required packages. Currently, I’m facing an issue where I am unable to perform RGB Color Camera capture; it doesn’t crash only when I run MonoCamera applications, which is odd. I’ve tried troubleshooting versions and I’m still investigating this issue.  The following photos below show the depth application examples I got to work that do not involve RGB color capture.

In addition, I made a repo to get started on a hello_world.py file where they walk you through how to create a pipeline to then start image capture and image processing, and the Github link to this repo is https://github.com/njzhu/HomeRover

My progress is slightly behind because of this small issue with the rgb camera, but once I figure that out, I hope I am able to understand the examples and apply depth capture to objects in our surrounding areas and rover’s vicinity. Since the examples are made by Luxonis, it should be extremely helpful and informative.

In the next week, I hope to get my hello_world.py up and running successfully and be able to do basic depth capture using the stereo depth perception technology on the Luxonis.

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Hayden’s Status Report 2/24/24

This week was way less productive than I wanted it to be. Sunday was dedicated to finishing up the CAD for the rover and finalizing our design review presentation. While I did not accomplish much in terms of completing design tasks for the rover beyond the CAD, I spent a lot of time learning how to calculate kinematics for the motion of the rover. I should be able to start working on the software system for the drive train. Since the drive train and the design are now finalized I was able to calculate the RPM we need the motor to spin to meet our target max speed of 0.5m/s. Given the fact the wheels are 2.5 inches in diameter we need to have an RPM of 150 to be at the maximum of our driving speed. I have began to relearn and mess around with Arduino code from the following sources that are inspiring the PCB design:
Source 1
Source 2
Source 3

Unfortunately I fell ill towards the end of the week and I have not been able to fabricate parts with Varun; nor have I been super productive. However, I am finally back on schedule and the time I’ve taken to learn kinematics and review Arduino programming will definitely streamline things in the future. In the next week I will finalize the PCB design and test my Arduino code with a basic breadboarded circuit. I will also help out as much as I can with fabricating the physical rover. Once again we are very proud of our CAD so here is another angle:

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Varun’s Status Update for 2/24/24

This week went by fast!

It was mostly dedicated towards the structures of the class. We presented our Design Presentation on Wednesday, so part of the first half of the week was focused on ensuring that we gave Nathan everything he need to ace the presentation, which he did! Additionally, as a team, we have started to work on the design report due soon! I spent a good chunk of time working with part orders. Though we scoped out some parts for the design presentation, I ended up spending some time trying to ensure that the parts would fit together. A mistake that I had to rectify was the dimensions of the bellows. Upon some time spent researching about how to interface silicone with tubing, I found that I may have incorrectly scouted out components, specifically those relating to the dimensions of the pipes and the bellows. Either way, I found the correct components, and finally placed our order for a lot of the electronics.

In addition, fabrication is in full swing! I’m 3D printing parts right now, just waiting for electronics to show up (hopefully soon). With electronics in tow, my goal is to have the suction cup system done by next week, and the arm finished. We’re definitely erring on the behind side of things due to shipping; I’m hoping we get the parts soon, then things should move much quicker. In the meanwhile, I’m essentially prepping for the arrival of the parts by 3D printing holder parts.

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Nathan’s Status Report for 2/17/24

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.

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Hayden’s Status Report 2/17/24

This week I spent the majority of my time designing and finalizing the mechanical CAD for the drive train of the rover. I spent a lot of time working on creating the belt system to allow us to drive the rover with two motors. I had to do a lot of designing and redesigning to be able to fit everything on the rover and I have imported the footprints in for the electronic components we plan on putting on the rover. I am currently designing footprints for modules to hold the electronics as well as finding a premade belt that works with the pulley system our wheels have. Below is the design for the dead-shaft drive train module:

Below is the live-shaft drive train module:

I also worked on the PCB some more and found some sources that have made game controllers using an Arduino. I have started experimenting with an Arduino and analog components to bring our basic PCB design to life in a practical and fast manner. Now that the rover is almost entirely designed I need to begin looking at kinematic calculations and how to perform them internally on the Raspberry Pi.

I am slightly behind on schedule from where I should be; however, the next three weeks on the schedule are fabricating the rover. Given that the majority of our parts need to be 3D printed we will have a lot of time between prints and assembly that I can put towards getting caught up on the embedded software side involving kinematic calculations. The next 24 hours will be spent finalizing the design review presentation and making sure that our design is robust and in a good place to pitch to the class.