Monday, May 4, 2015

Milestone Report

End of Week 4:  Get OpenROV hardware / software working in a development platform.  Familiarize ourselves with the OpenROV software and ROS.

Completed - we are running just the Arduino and the Beaglebone Black with software image 3.0

The ROS community provides several tutorials to get people up and running with basic ROS functionality.  Since David is new to ROS, he has gone through the basic and intermediate tutorials while Connor has used the material as a refresher.

Multiple forum posts have been helpful in better understanding the OpenROV software architecture.  While the entirety is not fully understood, the ability to interact with the software via plugins is understood.  This applies to both the node.js software on the BBB and the Cockpit software that runs in a browser.


End of Week6:  Create a 2-way interface that can communicate between ROS and the javascript that is running the ROV.

Uncertain - we still have some work before this is working.  We have spent some time to familiarize ourselves with the roslibjs library that we will likely use as the main interface. 

Last week we got sidetracked by researching a stretch goal that involved a way to get the video stream from the mjpeg stream that is native to OpenROV into a format that ROS can access and use with its computer vision libraries.  At this point we do not have a good solution in mind, but plan to have a conference call with the OpenROV people in the next day or two.

The goal of having a 2-way communication interface between ROS and the OpenROV is not unachievable by the end of the week, but it will require a solid effort this week.


Final Stretch:  Polish interface, and create clear documentation to be published to the OpenROV community. 

This is still very much the goal, and within reason.  We listed a generous 2 weeks for this task which should be ample and even provide a modest cushion for overflow from the End of Week 6 goals if necessary.

We would still like to provide an example of ROS integration that includes a computer vision algorithm because we think that it would be visually appealing and could create excitement for the project.

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