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Talay’s Status Report for 2/15

This week I drew out the block diagram and implementation details for our project. First, we decided to localize the person on the same frame of reference as the camera by using Ultra Wideband (UWB) instead of IMU to avoid drifting. I did some research on UWB models and came across DWM1000 which seems suitable for our use case. We put 2 in the order list so we can start testing them next week. With 2 anchors in the room, we figured out a way to locate the coordinates of the person. I also did some research on the stereo camera mounted on the wall. We decided on the stereo camera dual OV2311, since it provides depth perception and is also compatible with the Jetson. We will also set up the Jetson and start running certain libraries on the input images next week. We decided to use the OpenCV library to convert from stereo images to a 3D point cloud, and Open3D to convert from the 3D point cloud to a 2D occupancy matrix. We looked into these libraries and it seems appropriate for our use case. We also decided to use the D* path finding algorithm. This algorithm tracks updates continuously and gives future directions. With these high level implementation details ironed out, we also spent some time making the design presentation slides for next week. I believe our progress is on schedule.

Next week, we first plan on setting up the Jetson Nano. This in itself will take up some time. After we set it up, we would like to run the stereo camera on the Jetson and take some input images. We could try setting up the camera on the ceiling and see how it could classify images from the bird’s eye view. However, the priority is definitely setting up the Jetson and connecting it to the camera module.

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Charles’ Status Report for 2/15/2025

This week I spent time with the team talking more about the details for implementation. I spent some time investigating and researching how we were planning on detecting obstacles from our image. I figured that edge detection would be the most lightweight and functional tool, so I started looking at frameworks that support edge detection. Some of the libraries that I found were OpenCV, a popular computer vision framework, and PyTorch with TorchVision. These both have a lot of exciting documentation and examples of how to use them. I can see these being very helpful in creating the 2d occupancy array that we can later run a pathfinding algo on, like D-star.  I also found a somewhat robust library for object recognition called YOLO. Although YOLO doesn’t have the greatest accuracy for everyday objects (~57%), the underlying model should be helpful in our use case as there isn’t such a wide variety of objects that are seen in indoor shared spaces.

For the next week, we are going to be able to pick up our camera that we ordered and I want to start experimenting with the camera and seeing what kind of recognition/detection results we can get. This will probably require some set up time to get the camera to work with my laptop, and further work to get it to work with the NVIDIA Jetson we plan to use.

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Charles’ Status Report for 2/8

I spent this week thinking more about our project idea and the functionalities that we want to change/drop/add. I met with the team to talk through the ideal use cases for our project and what we are ultimately trying to accomplish. We came to the conclusion that our initial project had too many complexities and that it would be quite difficult to get a working and accurate product. Instead, we talked about different alternatives that could fulfill a similar use case and ideated several new ideas. I did some individual research on the frameworks and pre-existing libraries that could help in making a product that we wanted to.

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Charles’ Status Report for 2/1

This week, I met with the team to discuss our final ideas and direction for the project. We decided on something that slightly differed from our original idea, but we realized that we were a lot more enthusiastic about this idea than our original. We talked a lot about our vision for the project and the scope of the features we wanted to incorporate. We worked together on a project introduction/summary, we also began work on our project proposal presentation. For the upcoming week, I want to start thinking more about the exact parts we will need. Also, start to flesh out a timeline for the project.