Week 6

ProGRESS

Our main accomplishments this previous week were as follows:

Finished CAD for the base station
Finished End Effector CAD
Finished eCAD for PCB, sent out for manufacturing
Evaluated multiple ball detection algorithms

Arm CAD Complete

We have almost finished the CAD for the arm that fully encapsulates the end effector and the base station.

You can see a render of the almost final CAD to the right. Manufacturing has begun on the base (as you can see on the right).

ECAD Complete

Electrically, we designed a PCB to accomplish all of the tasks of our electronics system that are custom (e.g. not taken care of by the DENSO system). We designed an Arduino Shield that will mount on top of a SparkFun Redboard and will communicate both with our computer, and the Robot Controller. You can see a render of the PCB to the right. At "press time", the board was 50% manufactured having been submitted for manufacture last night.

Ball Detection Proof of Concept Progressing

Ball detection is proving challenging.

Minimal ball surface visible, seems to be due to shiny nature of ball and how ZED processes it
Might still also be a ZED calibration issue, data not as clean as it should be

Ball found with simplistic PCL clustering methods, but hard to separate from background, noise, and other objects

Showing up as one of roughly a dozen objects on average

Using PCL SACSegmentation framework, ball can be detected, but only with processing time taking 2-5 minutes. Not viable for us

We looked into deep learning options.

Could be easily doable in 2D only with Tensorflow
- Could at least give up angles instead of trajectory
- Would allow for detection of people easily too
3D PCL processing with Tensorflow is basically a grad thesis project, too complex

Challenges

Naturally, computer vision has been proving challenging for us this past week. Mechanically and Electrically great progress has been made. From a vision perspective, however, we have not yet found a solution that will work for us.

Plan for Next Week

Mechanical

Finish mounting end effector
Remote actuation of blowgun
Assemble base
Find a way to mount casters to base

Electrical

Assemble PCB
Wiring mechanical systems
Write initial embedded firmware

Software

Find Computer Vision solution
Test Computer Vision in representative conditions
Integrate embedded electronics into control software

REPORT

You can see the report we presented during our checkoff below for a few more pieces of information:

Team 17 Week 6 Checkoff

Google Sites

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