Finally I reach a milestone

Yes, the February milestone had now been reached, only about 5 weeks behind schedule. A really dumb agent which does a brute force search (DFS) is now ready. I added colored gradients to bitmaps, which doesn't look as cool as I thought it would look (maybe im using the wrong colors). Going to meet mentor tomorrow to tell him my ram kahani of 2 wasted months (out of a grand total of four).

The question is what do I do now? (Given that a report is required within 20 days). Should I extend the agents vision to give it more ability to do path planning, or should I make movement realistic. In the last meeting, he asked me to find out about what real-world sensors on autonomous rovers are like (for path-planning/navigation). Didn't find out much. I personally want to improve my generated terrains (using some interpolation/smoothing or maybe even Perlin noise) but god knows how little time I have left. I'm also in a quandary whether to implement vehicle motion or stick to my grid hopping bot.

Currently going through a few papers/articles on Mars Rover technology (pretty advanced if you ask me)

The auto-navigation system takes pictures of the nearby terrain using one of the Mars Exploration Rover stereo camera pairs (body-mounted hazard-avoidance cameras on Spirit, mast-mounted navigation cameras on Opportunity). After stereo images are taken, 3-D terrain maps are generated automatically by the rover software. Traversability and safety is then determined from the height and density of rocks or steps, excessive tilts and roughness of the terrain. Dozens of possible paths are considered before the rover chooses the shortest, safest path toward the programmed geographical goal. The rover then drives between 0.5 and 2 meters (1.6 and 6.6 feet) closer to its goal, depending on how many obstacles are nearby. The whole process repeats until it either reaches its goal, or is commanded to stop.

from this article on the Mars Rover site @ JPL, NASA

Lets see what Prof says tomorrow