Accomplishments
This week I spent a majority of time on the design report, especially since we had to make many changes to our design as I was working on object detection and realized that we can’t realistically count the number of items in each cart via the camera pipeline. Since it would be too inaccurate for our use case, we realized the better way is to look at the relative fullness of the cart and use edge detection to estimate the 2D space that is taken up by the items in the cart, and assign a quantitative number to that cart as a metric for relative fullness. Due to this design change, I went a little bit backwards in my research, as I had to switch gears and understand more of how to use edge detection to accomplish this. I spent some more time also doing research to account for this, which has set me back in progress a little bit. Additionally, since we are now not working on integrating an FPGA to our system, we have now decided to convert the repo to be on a python stack to allow for more simple OpenCV usage, which is something I reset this week. I also reached out to the director of dining services at CMU to talk about working with Scotty’s Market for our user testing, but I have not received anything back from them. There may be a chance that we have to create our own testing scenarios.
Progress
Currently, I am a little bit behind on the implementation according to the Gantt chart, but I plan on working extra this week to make up for it, and will hopefully have majority of the implementation done and preliminary tested with the camera that we ordered. To do this, I will be meeting with my group extra as well this week so we can all help each other get back on track.