SRVC Meeting minutes for September 23rd, 2009

• We discussed moving the robot. CG reported that shipping the bot is possible for about $600 each way. Still need to investigate how to get the bot packed for the trip, which may be possible to do through UBC Shipping/Receiving. CG to investigate and report next week. [CATHERINE].

• We did a bit of a round-table and decided on the following TO-DO's which we'll aim to be done by next Wednesday's meeting:
  • Complete conversion of basic functions to ROS [Marius and Dave]
    • Tilting laser driver
    • Order material for building a new laser/camera mount and assemble same.
    • WG nav stack
    • Mapping solutions (either ROS::gmapping or port pmap from our old code)
  • Convert "control" type functionality such as high-level planners and executive layer into a format compatible with newly "ROS"d low-level functions. [Dave with help from whoever's interested]
    • Random walk behaviour
    • 3 main high-level planners:
      • Explore frontiers
      • Cover contest area
      • Find tables
      • Look-back and objects
    • Top level state machine to choose between above planners
    • Port all required coordinate transform and viewpoint modeling functions which now exist in matlab to the new architecture to support the planning code.
  • Finalize network configuration and ensure everyone has access to a suitable machine on which to develop [Marius, Dave, Tomas]
    • Setup router on robot with all laptops to operate on local subnet, do nfs mounts, static ips, etc
    • Setup self-administered PC's on 54 subnet and give these machines access to the robot's network (candidate PC's are chifeng (MM), lapinkulta (DM) and norrlands (TH)
    • Provide instructions for all team members to setup their own ROS installation on these machine and/or to use a shared installation [MARIUS]
  • Integrate the recognition harness that James produced, run some tests and add new detectors. [Ankur and Catherine]
    • Define an interface for test data previously collected in robot dry runs, so that detectors can be evaluated on this data. [Ankur]
    • Implement Felzenswalb detector in the framework [Ankur]
    • Implement Helmer detector in the framework [Scott]
    • Implement Mccann detector in the framework [Sancho]
    • Provide an interface for training data which is compatible with the web search phase, and allows for many iterations of training/detection to be done with different training set parameters to allow evaluation of various parameters [Ankur and Catherine]
  • Add additional information and/or filters to the web data grabbing phase [Pooyan, Ankur, Catherine]
    • Provide additional information about each object (which we do plan to use this time): object size, 3D object models whenever possible, object weight, a flag indicating whether or not each image has a simple background [Catherine and Pooyan]
    • Investigate additional image filtering techniques (possibly could use the work of Jay) [Scott, Pooyan]
    • Integrate with new classification framework [Ankur, Catherine, Pooyan]
  • Get fraser (the new big laptop) up and running with CUDA [Tomas and Walter]
    • Install cuda drivers
    • Try Cuda Sift
• An outstanding TODO from previous meetings: Ask if mechanical turk is ok to use during SRVC training data gathering. [DAVE?]

-- DavidMeger - 28 Sep 2009