Week 1 Post 1

 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 smoother. Another project that I showed my interest in was "The Arms." The arms are robotic and are made to assist in surgeries and human routines. One of the surgeries that the arms would perform is tracheostomy. As for human routines, the mechanical arms can perform basic chores, such as cleaning and wiping. Mythra told us that those mechanical arms are capable of learning a new task if it is viewed by the system once after watching a video of any person performing the task. However, the task should be simple for the robot to imitate the human performance. The framework and language that are used for developing the arms are Ros and Python accordingly. Personally, I am experienced with Python, but I lack knowledge of Ros, which was my task for today to watch explanatory videos of the Ros framework and read the documentation on the official website. For a moment, I was a little frustrated with all the new technologies and a new framework with many libraries presented to us. However, later on, after researching and having Mythra explain to us the basic concepts of the Ros framework, I got excited because of the possibilities that Ros presents. I am still not assigned officially to any of the projects because our supervisor still thinks of how to divide the interns. Overall, it was a productive day, even though I did not get a chance to start programming. I am looking forward to working on the assigned project that will advance my knowledge and experience in the development of Artificial Intelligence.

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