The first full hardware test with the sensor mounted on a rotating arm and a person walking through the workspace. CLEAR, CAUTION, and STOP all fired where they should. The arm stopped. The sensor kept up.
The EB300 arm is printing. Motors and hardware arrived today. Rather than wait for assembly, tonight’s session wrote the full 6-axis ESP32 stepper firmware, the ROS 2 bridge node, a tkinter GUI controller, and a complete motor test guide — so the moment the first print finishes, there’s a validated pipeline ready to wire into.
This part teaches the safety system the arm’s reachable envelope, so detections the arm can’t physically reach stop triggering stops. The safety zones stop being uniform spheres and start being shaped to what the arm can actually threaten.
This part adds a layer that tells a walking person apart from a box on a cart before the detection reaches the zone logic — so the system stops crying wolf at harmless objects, without ever being able to miss a real person.
The startup background-learning phase is necessary — but only once. Phase 5 makes the learned map persist across reboots, and closes the loophole where a person standing still long enough could be quietly absorbed into the background.
The IWR6843AOP is now running a complete ROS 2 safety pipeline on the Jetson — CLEAR/CAUTION/STOP zone detection with ego-motion compensation, voxel background learning, fault handling, and a heartbeat watchdog. One non-obvious bug dominated the session: velocity filtering was silently eating motionless people.