I’ve worked with the transparency problem with the buttons on Remote Nav for a while, but I feel like continuing too long would be detrimental to the project. I modified the layout to accommodate for the change in plans, and this should be somewhat of a final layout at least for this version. By the end of the week, we had a nearly full-capacity demo of the port to the PR2. Clicking left and right, instead of turning the robot, turns the robot’s head to look left and right. The robot can currently move forward, turn around, look left, and look right. We have yet to try everything all at once in having it drive around the room, but this will be our next big step to finishing this interface. My next interface that I am working on is the local user interface. It will handle editing the map file to specify where the remote operator can and cannot go (physical/locational privacy handling) To do that, I have looked into ways in which I could interpret the data. My first thought is reading in a map with the defined zones in black. It has to be the same size as the original map. Can I pull the coordinates from that picture and translate them to the map? if I drive the robot into that area, can I print a statement that the robot entered my zone? These are the things that I want to try to gain some headway on this week and hopefully I can get working on the interface aspect of it in a while.

Simplified Lab Map

This map is a simplified floor plan from the SLAM map that we have generated earlier, and it will be what the local user will see when defining zones. The problem with the original SLAM map is that it is difficult to interpret. While this map is very simple, you can identify where the doors are and some of the furniture in the room, which helps with identifying locations. To get some help with future development, I talked to Michelle, one of Cindy’s former students who also worked with Qt (the C++ one) on a project. She used openGL for her projects, and she was able to give me a lot of tips for dealing with QGraphicsViews, implementing transparent buttons (although I had already benched that bug by the time I talked to her), and how to accomplish some of the tasks that are similar between our two programs. I learned a lot from talking to her, and I have some good ideas for moving forward. She also provided me with some reading material for Qt development, and I think I have a more firm grasp on the framework behind Qt now.