This is coming a little late, but my fourth week of this internship was filled with more Hackathon work- this time to produce a demo for it by June 30th.
Monday and Tuesday were more prep based on the lessons of the mock Hackathon the previous week- we worked out a unified approach to the problem based on improvements developed by the student heading the Hackathon. Our job was to test that code and make sure the simulation carried over to the physical robots. We got the robots moving and we added in some old code that produced waypoints for them to visit, and instead of overshooting each waypoint as they did before, they stopped essentially right on the mark. After we verified that everything was working in the base code as it should, we got to work on solving the problems of pathfinding and obstacle avoidance. I was assigned the problem of designing and implementing an occupancy grid- a grid of squares indicating whether or not there is something there. Using this grid, robots could figure out paths around obstacles as they find them, and if obstacles were broadcast to other rovers, they could avoid the same obstacles. This took up Wednesday, Thursday, and part of Friday. The reason it took so long was that each person made a different branch off the main code, and we had to incrementally merge all the changes we were making as we tested them, then make sure the merged code also worked as expected. The occupancy grid module I had written was mostly independent from the other changes, but the one section of the code I had to modify to integrate it into the rover's program was touched on heavily by the others. Eventually, in the simulation all the bugs were fixed and the rovers moved normally there. The demo was up in about half an hour, so we loaded the code on the rovers to test them beforehand, and found that they consistently crashed for each of our integrated code branches except the main one, which did not have everything integrated but only the last version of the code tested on the rovers. We demoed that code instead of the integrated changes, and it was deemed satisfactory for the purpose of the competition in Boston on July 16th.
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AuthorKelsey Geiger: a maker, learner, teacher, and doer. Proud to be out and proud of her work. Archives
August 2017
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