Week 13 Update (4/9-4/12)

 This week's progress centered around the final stages of development for both teams. Below are further details for each team's progress in the past week and the ongoing plan for final adjustments before the Capstone Showcase this Friday, 4/12.

Total hours: 14 hours.

A* Team Update:

On the A* side, we created a separate testing project for our PGM parser and A* search itself. This is mainly so we don't drastically alter our current move nodes code to try and fit in both the parser and A* only for it to not work and needing to revert back and lose progress. The parser works as expected, and also had an addition of some code that would explicitly define a nodes neighbors in the 8 directions around it. Code for the A* search also began development after, and had a few hiccups in getting the neighbors of the currently viewed node such as being stuck in an infinite loop, many, many times. This led to us going back to an earlier version of the A* code that did not loop forever, where we saw that the one issue we had was easily fixable by swapping a "<" to a ">=". With A* and the parser now functioning in our test file, we will be spending the time leading up to the Showcase by transporting it to the project itself and including any code needed to tell the simulated robot to follow the path discovered by A*.


Fig 1. Image of PGM map representation

Arduino Team Update:

We ran into some hardware conflicts with the ME/ECE teammates in these final few days of development before shared deadlines. Unfortunately, they felt strongly that they could eliminate the Raspberry Pi from their setup entirely, using hard-coded motor commands from an Arduino file instead. Once we had access to our Raspberry Pi again, we were able to establish serial connection and communication with a personal Arduino. We also updated the logic and output message format from the pi program. From here, dependent on the ME/ECEs, we can re-install the pi onto the bot hardware and run our tests to ensure the serial messages are compatible. 



Fig 1. 

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