The first component of Mimas that will be used in the actual final assembly has been 3D printed at Edinburgh Napier Merchiston Campus, thanks to Alexandros Gkanatsios' help. The part needs to be sanded and white-painted. However, this represents the first great step towards the final assembly of Mimas Rover!
The 1st meeting between me and Brian Davison took place. The discussion was about all updates made in the past months, especially during the summer period, an in-depth explanation of the project and an overview of the early-stage literature review.
After several attempts, a stepper motor flange was installed on the structure, since previously the camera housing was attached to the motor only using a custom/adapted nut screwed tightly. The new flange ensures structural rigidity and increases rotation precision. The code accuracy has been increased, as well as the algorithm used to process panoramic pictures. The main improvement concerns a post-process step to remove the lens distortion when taking a panoramic picture: even if the results obtained are good, there is still a lot of room for further improvements. The two images below show the differences between a non-processed panoramic picture (top) and a processed panoramic picture (bottom): the second one lost some details around the frame of the image, mainly on the upper and lower part.
The team discussed some functionalities of Mimas Rover, such as the robotic arm and the sample-catching system. Adding a range of tools to collect different samples from the terrain, such as sand, soil and rocks, may allow the rover to be more useful for scientific experiments in a real-world situation, so they were considered when the discussion was taking place.