Week 4

Achievements of the project as the bench inspection approaches

Following week 4 and the final lab day, the car is in a hardware-complete form. 

All connections are soldered and everything is mounted in place on the chassis.

The AI camera is successfully detecting objects and outputting the results to the terminal.

The sensors are successfully detecting objects and are able to control the wheels via the program that was created. There is the occasional collision with objects such as walls, but through some software tweaking, it might be possible to reduce the occurrence of this.

Summary of the fourth week in the lab

The circuit design was finalised and implemented into the system using soldered connections through a Veroboard, along with the Battery HAT allowing the system to move around without any wired connections. The camera is also now connected via it's ribbon cable within the same system.

The image below shows the completed car.

Image showing the completed car.

Image showing the final circuit.

During the testing of the system, the following video was recorded as a proof of concept to show that the system is functional.

Short video clip showing the functional car

In terms of the camera, a pretrained model has been implemented into the system, meaning that it can detect traffic lights and stop signs, as well as other objects such as cell phones, people and laptops. Below is a number of different detections the camera was able to make.

4 Images showing the camera's view and the results in the terminal on the left, as well as the top left of the camera view.

Issues, reflections and future direction

As the project draws to a close, the system is close to being as perfect as the components can function. In between the final lab day and the bench inspection, the main aims will be to quantify the performance of the system.

Some areas that can hopefully be quantified would be the performance of the sensors, the power delivery of the battery and the driving force of the motors.

Finally, on a programmatic side, the camera and ultrasonic sensors currently don't work as they should together, but work well separately, so extra time to combine the 2 programs will be taken.