What I did the week before

Researching motion planning frameworks and algorithms.

What I did this week

I started the past week by first spending some time defining the API of an octal tree (octree) implementation and actually implementing it.

Then I moved on to setting up the simulation environment based on my plan from last week. I’ve managed to set up a ROS 1 environment with Catkin build tools as the barebone. On top of that, I’ve built and installed packages and libraries that we plan to use (libfreenect2, iai_kinect2 for perception, and octomap for mapping). This took a major amount of time since integrating multiple components with different build chains and versions was non-trivial.

I then looked into the perception libraries that we plan to use, read their documentation, and their example code. I haven’t fully finished this part yet and I plan to continue doing it over the next week.

I’ve also spent a day or two finding existing solutions to the problem that we are trying to tackle and read a few related papers that might be helpful when we start testing, performance debugging, and verifying our project.

Ah, also — the design review slides. I worked on the system specification and diagrams. I’ll also be presenting it next week.

What I plan to be doing next week

Preparing for design review presentation.

Keep learning about the perception libraries.

Testing the Kinect One camera once it arrives.