Progress: This week was an important week. We started learning about ROS, which will be useful when we need to program the drone, and we designed a possible container for our drone. However, the most important part of this week was contacting the developers of the Spiri. We were able to email them our questions and tell them about our project, and judging from their answer, they seem eager and willing to help us with our project in hopes of creating more " educational partnerships." They offered us a discount on the drone, which helps with our budget problem, and they offered technical support whenever we need it. They also published all of the information that we needed about Spiri (including the Spiri data sheet) and a simulator for its API, which will be very useful to us while we wait for the Spiri to arrive.
Problems Solved: One of the major problems that we solved was the budget, which the Spiri developers helped with by offering a discount. We were also able to distribute more tasks among ourselves, which will hopefully speed up the project a little bit.
Lessons Learned: We learned that communication is very important. By finally contacting the Spiri developers, we realized that our project could move along much faster with their help. Luckily, they are willing to help, and so it is crucial to maintain contact with them from now until the project is complete.
Problem: The main problem right now is that it is taking a while to learn ROS. It seems to be a little complicated and advanced, and it will certainly delay our project a little bit. We are also working on trying to get a simulator for ROS. Possible candidates for software that we might use are a program called Webots and the Spiri simulator.
Plan: In order to counterattack the delay that was caused by ROS, we put 3 people responsible for learning it, while the other 2 members of the group take care of any other task that relates to the drone. This will hopefully make learning ROS a little faster.
Sources to learn ROS:
1. http://wiki.ros.org/
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WyuAZ1SuTI&index=1&list=PL3064BF19A4F4CD1F
No comments:
Post a Comment