Were any changes made to the existing design of the system (requirements, block diagram, system spec, etc)? Why was this change necessary, what costs does the change incur, and how will these costs be mitigated going forward?
One significant change we made was switching from the Jetson Nano to the Jetson Orin Nano. This was necessary as we became cognizant that the Nano’s compute might not have been sufficient to run ROS, Object Detection, and SLAM simultaneously. We also saw that it took the Nano 40 seconds to run YOLOv7. In terms of costs we incur we were lucky that the Orins were available in inventory so we didn’t have the shell money out of them from our budget. An additional cost is that the Orin needs to be supplied with a higher voltage so we have to upgrade a hexapod’s power supplies to meet its demands.
What are the most significant risks that could jeopardize the success of the project? How are these risks being managed? What contingency plans are ready?
Currently, our greatest troubles has been in bringing up the Jetson and Raspberry Pi boards to run all the relevant software that we need (ie. ROS, YOLO, Jetpack, & Python versions meet requirements). This has taken a bit more time than previously planned, though we have learnt many things.
Since we did just swap from Jetson Nano to Jetson Orin Nano, we will also need to make sure that the Jetson Orin Nano does not have any hidden requirements.
Provide an updated schedule if changes have occurred.
We will have to extend our scheduled time for setting up Jetsons (since we changed to the Orin). It’s a good thing we have slack!