We’re Back…. Meeting Minutes – 30 Jun 2008

• July
• 1

1:44 pm General

Had our first meeting in a month and the first item on the agenda was to determine where we left off. After an hour of getting the lab setup again (plugging in cables, turning on computers, network setup, and reformat & software re-installed on 2 computers) we were finally able to play around with our code. And surprisingly, it’s looking good. After a few modifications, we were able to start the GUI and display up to date laserdata from a single robot while maintaining communication between them. Pretty cool stuff.

We even figured out a hack to get the images working again. For some reason, the window we’ve created to display images won’t refresh the image unless the window is resized. So now every time we need to draw a new image we oscillate 1 pixel larger and smaller in screen width so we don’t have to use the mouse to resize the window every time we need to repaint the image. Pretty cheesy, but an easy fix for now.

A couple of important notes for our home audience.

1. There are currently 4 independant applications that we created that need ran (DBApp, GUI, DroneApp, and MapWnd for images). The robot apps have ~15 arguments to setup to get our software to run correctly. These applications are in addition to the UT, Image, WCS, and MySQL servers.
2. There is a time limit (15 secs) to how long you have between starting the GUI and all of the robots in order to get the ad-hoc network to setup correctly.
3. Images are not currently being sent through the WCS, though drive commands are.

We’ve reached a very cool juncture in the project. In a way, everything is working and merely needs tweaked which gives us free reign to do some pretty cool research if we have the inclination. And I do. The GUI and AI are the two biggest interest areas right now. We need to work on the GUI window so that we can get some more features into it and working, as well as work on the AI so that we have better obstacle avoidance and victim detection and reporting.

I’d like to see more participation so recruitment will be a main focus of the fall semester. For now though, things are looking good. If you’re interested in the Roomba project at all, I’m also in the Engineering Building on Wednesday nights at the same time as the USARSim meeting. I foresee that the fates of these 2 projects will become intertwined. See you next week.