Week 2: Duckiebot booting and Science department luncheon

We had June 19 off as it was Juneteenth!

6/20/2024

I attended the science department luncheon where Professor Kyle Broaders dived into “How to give a good oral presentation“. This talk was definitely one to keep in mind anytime I had to give a presentation involving a slideshow. We usually give a slideshow for our weekly Computer Science department meeting so moving forward, I will implement what I learned which were to:

• make sure not to bore the audience with too much information they will not understand.
• suppress the urge to add so many distracting gifs to the presentation.
• not have a chunk of text on a certain slide and talk at the same time since it is known that we cannot give our 100% focus to multiple things at a time.

6/21/2024

Now on to booting the duckiebot. Another problem occurred. Even after the SD card had been flashed successfully, once we run “dts fleet discover” on the terminal several times, we did not get the expected output. We then checked our internet connections and it seems the problem may stem from that. The duckiebot and the computer need to be on the same WiFi connection but here’s the situation – our desktop is connected to the ethernet and our duckiebot is connected to the school’s WiFi.

Another thing was that the wiring was a bit incorrect so Ellen and I checked the duckietown documentation on the assembly of the DB21J and corrected all the wiring which seemed to make a pair of the lights on rainduck work as well as the fan- a step forward I would say.

We had our weekly departmental meeting where he shared our highs and lows on the project so far and explained our problem to the group so they would have a sense of what we were doing.

06/25/2024

Taking a break from trying to solve the networking issues with the DB21J, I moved on to the assigned reading of the week – “A Survey and Analysis of Multi-Robot Coordination” which went into details about Multi-Robot System(MRSs), multi robot coordination and that broadened my understanding on motion planning, task planning and some conflicts the robots encounter in a given environment.