The Imager has been renewed, slightly changing its structure and the Micro Servo was substituted with a small stepper motor. Cable management has been carried out and the first panoramic picture taken since the arrival to Edinburgh was successfully taken!
Reassembly of all components after the trip required a few hours and for the first time, the Imager was assembled on top of the Rover Equipment Deck, which is the upper part of the WEB, where all sensors and the mast can be placed. A Micro Servo SG90 has been connected between the camera housing and the mast tower, to ensure precise pitch rotation control. However, due to the absence of a metal flange, the overall structure is wobbly and needs several improvements.
Due to the end of the summer break, all components assembled in the past 2 months were disassembled and gently packed, ready for a long journey by car from Milan (Italy) to Edinburgh. The overall list of innovations made for the Honours Project during the summer includes computer vision colour detection, computer vision free-path recognition, computer vision image stitching, a draft of the mast with its rotation mechanism, the WEB frame, six all-stainless-steel wheels, and a fully configured Raspberry Pi4. In addition, several additional components were packed for the trip: four high-torque servo motors, six high-torque DC motors, hundreds of connectors, jump wires, sensors, battery packs, motor drivers, nuts and bolts and many other equipment tools and consumables, for a total weight of ~50kg.
The Warm Electronics Box (WEB) is the main body of the rover, it carries and protects the computer, the electronics and the instrument systems (which are basically the equivalent of the rover's brains and heart). This structure needs to be extremely solid and as spacious as possible. For Mimas, the WEB was assembled using several stainless steel bars, kept together by nuts and bolts. The obtained shape is a metal frame that will certainly undergo several upgrades and changes: white panels will be assembled to protect the delicate components inside it and the upper part will host the Rover Equipment Deck.
Obstacle detection and target tracking are two major issues for autonomous vehicles, and Mars Rovers require this technology to ensure safe driving on the surface of the Red Planet. Developing and early-stage obstacle avoidance using OpenCV required dozens of hours: the system's pre-requirements were mainly focussed on a simple, reliable solution that could be adjusted easily side by side with the evolution of the Mimas prototype. At the end of this session, an acceptable design was reached.