Week 7

Feb 20, 2018

Planning and Navigation

This week we set up the API to connect with the database that can be accessed anywhere on the JMU network. It currently allows for HTTP GET requests to be sent to our database of sensor data and locations. We also added a simulated Velodyne sensor to the simulate vehicle that we got working last week.

We changed the package structure to simplify programming workflow and allow for simple transition from testing endpoints to hardware endpoints. We also added nodes for a the car motor both in testing and in the endpoints packages. The node in the endpoints package is able to communicate to an Arduino over Serial with data it gets from a ROS topic.

Sensing and Processing

This week, we achieved one of our main priorities, which was mounting the Velodyne to the golf cart. This allowed us to run our first test drive with the Velodyne VLP-16 around the X-Labs parking lot. We also conducted some research into the mapping capabilities of Autoware and looked into procuring an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) that will aid in telling us how fast we are going and help make decisions regarding the input variables. We are currently working on mounting the front sensors as well as getting a proper mobile power supply that meets our requirements and is safe to use with our high quality sensors. Below are some pictures that help visualize our progress.

Front End

Still trying to figure out how to create dynamic buttons using swift in the apple environment. Switching to a single windows tablet to host all the computation and informations could solve this problem, as well as information sharing problems we are having currently. The Logo is almost finished. We are testing the add, delete and create queries within the database to the best of our abilities. We also finalized the data flow of the server to the user interface.