Week 1 Update (9/25-9/29)

This week's progress consisted primarily of researching robotic simulation/visualization software, establishing required project documents and documentation, and troubleshooting tutorials for ROS.

The total hours logged this week for the team was: 28 hours.

Below are screenshots and photos documenting what was accomplished this week. 

Fig 1. YouTube tutorial playlist | ROS and Raspberry Pi

This YouTube playlist was found/assigned to the CS team by an ECE Mouse Droid teammate. The videos by Articulated Robots provide a tutorial on how to create a simulated mapping robot using ROS and a Linux machine. 

Upon following these tutorials, we came to the conclusion that attempting the same steps on a Linux Virtual Machine was far too taxing for our personal computers to handle. A single school computer is in the process of being made accessible to us for this purpose. 

Fig 2. Screenshot from (failed) attempt to download/run a version of ROS on Windows

Fig 3. Research on ROS Alternatives (RL pictured)

Fig 4. Two Raspberry Pi 3's and One Raspberry Pi 4 (model B) provided by Dr. Van Haaster


It should be noted that several hour's worth of time spent working this past week was spent resolving conflicts regarding expectations of the functions of the Mouse Droid and scope of the project as a whole. 

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