The overall goal for the Physics Seminar this semester has been to produce an autonomous rover capable of moving throughout a “simple” environment without hitting any obstacles. This complex idea was made more manageable by dividing the responsibilities into three groups: Data Acquisition, Information Processing, and Actuation. Our team, Information Processing, was responsible for receiving data from the acquisition team, making decisions, and relaying those decisions to the actuation team. As the “middle-man” of the project, our actual responsibilities were more fluid since we worked alongside the other two teams to better facilitate inter-process communication. This report will catalog what we did and what we learned as a result.
The first hurdle we addressed was connecting the lidar to the Arduino Uno. The lidar unit connected