Week 1

The aim of our project over the next five weeks is to develop a pathfinding robot, that will be able to navigate a room, using a depth sensor. This task requires both hardware and software development, as the robot itself will need to be built and powered by motors, but it will have to be programmed to detect collisions using the sensor.

The first week of our project was mostly dedicated to planning and preparing for the weeks ahead. This was due to us encountering our first problem: we did not have all of the correct components. We were missing one of our motors, as well as the motor control board we ordered. We also discovered we would need a vga to hdmi converter in order to properly set up our raspberry pi 4. We had also not accounted for the fact we needed to develop a feedback loop in order to track the distance the robot travels. Due to this, we decided that we would start on the physical section of the project in week 2, and instead focus on researching the mathematics we need, ensuring the depth camera works as we would expect, ordering the extra components, and beginning to work on the pathfinding code. The camera works as we expected it to, detecting a difference in depth between objects and the wall. The depth difference is represented by a difference in colour, as shown in the image below:

During the week leading up to the next lab we plan to fully design the mechanical section of the project, and finish researching the coding process so we can begin to test the functionality of the camera when it is operating as a part of the robot in the next lab.