Week 1 Post 2

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 to avoid dealing with mathematical problems as I feel like I lack knowledge in that field, so whenever I have to do the math, I feel like I am getting caught in imposter syndrome by thinking that other people have more knowledge in that field compared to me, which in my head, makes me feel less of a professional, and as a result, these thoughts take away the spark that I have when working on an AI project. In comparison to my project, I have an example of another person who is going to work on the project called "Drone." Once we got introduced to that project, the presenter told us that the project would require a lot of calculations and solving integral equations to improve the trajectory control for the drone. Even though such a project sounds exciting to try to work on it, I immediately in my head removed any thought of trying it out again because of my fears of working closely with math. On the bright side, as soon as I got assigned to work on the arms, I was given a list of literature, presentations, and videos that I had to review for my understanding of the project. While reviewing all the materials, I realized the power of building such arms and the power of a fully developed robot in general, and it blew my mind away. The arms are able to learn to perform human tasks through some techniques, such as LfD (learning from demonstration), PbD (programming by demonstration), imitation learning, and apprenticeship learning. The more information I was getting, the more possibilities I could see in my head for new developments. One of the thoughts was to try and teach the robot how to deal with the dishwasher. By demonstrating the arms how to operate the dishwasher and the objects that are supposed to go in and out of the dishwasher, we could ease the daily tasks for humans by giving them more time to do what they desire to do instead of washing the dishes. I was fascinated, and the ideas like these were all over my mind all day long. Unfortunately, Mythra, who is my supervisor and mentor for the project, was not able to be present today, so all I was assigned to do was review the material. However, I am looking forward to introducing the idea with the dishwasher and the arms to Mythra when I meet him in the office and start working on algorithms to enhance the arms' performance. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 11 Post 1

This is the last official day of my internship, according to my internship proposal. I decided to come to the lab just to get into this environment full of creative people one last time. Honestly, I am going to miss this lab, the project that I worked on, the people in the lab whose creativity inspired me to strive for more, and the atmosphere of this place in general. This is one of the best schools in engineering in the country, and I am very grateful for having an opportunity to work with such amazing and experienced professionals in the field of Robotics and AI. My journey here was not flawless, and of course, I had some obstacles and challenges on my way throughout this internship. However, those obstacles and challenges did not stop me from accomplishing my goals and proving to myself that I could become who I am meant to be. I feel so much more experienced and knowledgeable after this internship because I had never thought that I would be able to work on such novel for me things...
Read more

Week 9 Post 3

I start realizing that I am coming to the end of my journey at the Collaborative Robotics Lab. It feels sad because I am used to working on something that I am passionate about and being independent in what I am working on. Also, I am sad because I am used to the creative people around me, working on projects that have never been explored before by other people, which daily gave me the inspiration to pursue my passions in AI. It feels like I always belonged to this lab and worked here for years, instead of two months. I do understand though that it is not the end because I might have an opportunity in the future to join this lab as a graduate student or a Ph.D. student. On the good side, I am getting progress on my kNN algorithm. I was able to fix the bugs that occurred last time, and I started getting the clustering that I needed. It seems like it is working; however, I am not sure if that is what I need exactly. The way I see the project, it goes exactly how it is supposed to go, but...
Read more

Final Reflection

  It has been two and a half months working as a research intern in the Collaborative Robotics Lab at Purdue University. Words cannot describe how grateful I am for the experience and knowledge gained during the internship. When I first started, I could not possibly imagine that I would be able to go this far in understanding, analyzing, and researching the hard concepts, structures, and algorithms in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. As I worked mostly with AI, I have a lot to say about the progress that I have made as a researcher in this field. Starting off with the first few weeks in the lab, I can say that I felt overwhelmed and frustrated with all the new information and tools that I needed to comprehend and implement. I was hoping to work in a team of other research interns so that I would be able to collaborate and solve problems with other people. However, I had to work by myself as all the interns were assigned to different projects. At first, it scared me because I w...
Read more