As a team, we’ve started to finally get our bearings on how we can approach this project and end up with something usable as an MVP. It has been a very challenging road to try to understand an all-new technology stack (ROS), understand the intended use case of the researchers, start to get some of these embedded components compiled and working, and get a plan for how to divvy up the work. Even simple things like needing to run the ROS code on an M1 MacBook was such a challenge and one of our team members bought a cheap PC on which to run Linux just to make it easier.
The future is looking good though .. I think in two more weeks we will have a substantial amount of work done, enough that the hardware team should be able to actually try it out on the real HyperRail. This is one of the few times that I wish I were taking these classes in person .. I would love to be able to actually go and get my hands on the real hardware and see the robot come to life. Hopefully one day I’ll be able to see our work actually performing some useful research, that would be amazing!
