Week 6 – March 23rd to March 30th

In this week, the following topics were worked on:

• Completed the design of the camera support mentioned on the last blog post.
• Started exploring ViSP, an open source visual servoing platform library, which might help with estimating verticality through the camera image.
• Worked out which of the Arduino code blocks left by the other students is responsible for getting the inertial readings.

Week 5 – March 16th to March 23rd

In this week, the following topics were worked on:

• Started designing a different kind of support for the camera which grants it the two DoF (Degrees of Freedom) relevant for estimating verticality.

Week 4 – March 9th to 16th

In this week, the following topics were worked on:

• Last ROS session by teacher Miguel Oliveira.
• Finished the development of a ROS node which analyses images coming from the camera and prints out the centroid coordinates of a blue ball.
• Installed all dependencies of the ROS package developed by previous students in which the inertial data is obtained and processed.

Week 3 – March 2nd to 9th

In this week, the following topics were worked on:

• C++ and ROS lessons by teacher Miguel Oliveira.
• Making the hardware operational.
• Beginning of the development of a ROS node which will analyse the images coming from the camera and publish some information about objects/features in said image.

Week 2 – February 23th to March 2nd

In this week, the following topics were worked on:

• Installing ROS (Robot Operating System) on my computer.
• Solving ROS tutorials in preparation for next week’s ROS and C++ session.

Week 1 – February 16th to 23rd

In this week, the following topics were worked on:

• More research on articles about the thesis’s topic.
• Writing a preliminary report which explains the details of each of the thesis’s tasks.

Week 0 – February 9th to 16th

In this week, the following topics were worked on:

• Changing the layout and cleaning up LAR (Laboratory of Automation and Robotics).
• Attribution of each student’s workplace on the laboratory.
• Starting to research other student’s previous thesis about PHUA and other articles about the topic.

Blog Introduction

To try and accompany the development of my master’s thesis, which is a part of the Joint Masters degree in Mechanical Engineering at Universidade de Aveiro, this blog was created. Its main objective is to demonstrate the academic community (but not only) the research and experimental process done.