Once more we had a mixed result week. During today we had a meeting to assemble and test everything we worked individually during the week and again, not everything went well as expected.
Maria:
- We fixed the infra-red lamps on the new places, based on the new location of the camera according to what we've been testing. It work well. For now there is a small region on the right of the screen that is not capturing movement, but we ran some more tests and it seems that we overcome that with better calibration.
- We went to test the multitouch drivers on the MacBook Pro because it's the better computer we have and it should be used on the presentation for the work, but we ran into some problems, because of the 64 bit drivers. After a couple of hours we decided to investigate more, because the 32 bit drivers do not work correctly.
Julio:
- We finished the Android App (based on brmGPS free source code) to run on one of our Android mobile phones to put on top of Julio and that way, get the correct GPS coordinates from Julio.
- We also finished a C# class that using sockets receives the GPS coordinates from Julio. This will be assembled, if everything goes well, next weekend and tested "on board" of Julio.
Chasso:
- We gave a pretty extensive testing to the odometry (establishing location based on sensors) and we got some bad results. At the beginning we taught our localization algebra functions we incorrect, but after some time and debug we found out the problem was an odd one... the HiTechnic Compass sensor we are using on Chasso is very sensitive. What we discover is that near a concrete wall or a metallic chair (less than 50 cm) the compass can give incorrect readings on values up to 50 degrees, witch is a very high value. By it self this just ruins our expectations of having a very good estimation algorithm. We change the location of the compass, by extending the pole more 20 cm, but it wasn't enough. The main problem is the concrete walls. We have to deal with this problem on the following days.
- This problem prevented us from testing other functions already implemented on code, like: returning home, travel by track points, cleaning the path and others.
- We fixed a problem with the light sensor, because in bright days the light can be too much inside Chasso and because the Lego NTX color sensor is too sensitive doesn't identify the orange color and stops turning the base. We fixed this by adding some more lego pieces to each side of the base.
