karinaagliullova

Today was quite a productive day. I had a meeting with Mythra who gave me and my teammate a presentation on the Arms and described different aspects of work that needs to be done. He started off by explaining what reinforcement learning is. As I reviewed the material that he sent me before, I already knew the basic idea of the process. However, today he decided to go deeper into the explanation because Mythra wanted to give us a chance to understand what the project is about. Mythra also let me choose what particular part of the project I would like to work on. He explained to us some concepts of computer vision, which included the explanation of the digital images that I am going to use when working on the Arms. This was the area of interest for me, as I chose to work on gesture recognition. I was fascinated by the option of learning image processing and open CV. Even though it sounded difficult to learn how to analyze and manipulate digital images, I decided for myself to accept that...

As of today, I was acknowledged that I got assigned to work on the project called "The Arms."My first thought was in alignment with the emotions that I displayed, which was happiness. I have been dreaming of working on the arms ever since I got introduced to that project. However challenging it might sound, it would be rewarding for me to accomplish the goals assigned to me throughout working on this project. Today I realized what attracted me so much in the arms, and it was the idea of working on building a bridge that could connect a human and a robot, which is what I am striving to work on in the future. Designing a program that could let robots understand human tasks better and perform them will, therefore, let humans understand robots better and improve the quality of life for many people by simplifying their lifestyles. The arms project was also my number one option from day one because the project did not require me to get into mathematics too deep. Indeed, I am trying...

  It was the second day of my research internship today. I had a chance to work along with Dr. Voyles, who is the head of the Collaborative Robotics Lab, and one of his Ph.D. students, Mythra Balakuntala. Mythra showed three other interns and me some of the projects that people in the lab were working on, and he let us choose a project that we were interested in. While there were many exciting and advanced technologies and robots that they were working on, I chose for myself only two. One of them is called "Rally cars," which are the cars that could be controlled by the middleware framework called Ros and the high-level language Python. The cars have wheels that can turn to different angles; however, the cars still need improvement in programming to be able to be more flexible. Additionally, each rally car can develop a speed up to 60 mph. For that project, I would need to work on programming its flexibility for turning the wheels at different angles, making the cars drive sm...