DASL Wiki

Hello! My name is Jason Kreitz, and I am currently in Korea doing research at KAIST's HUBO Lab. This page will be my trip blog. Each week, I will be posting my experiences, and each post will roughly follow this outline:

1. Photo of the week

2. New Korean that I met

3. What new cultural insight about Korea did you learn this week?

4. What did you learn about yourself?

5. What is the status of your technical projects and what skills did you learn?

My photo of the week is of a lunch we had with some of Professor Park's old PhD candidates.

They came in from the University of Illinois and are also here on an NSF grant. Almost everyone from HUBO lab will be leaving this next week to visit universities in Europe, and so unfortunately none of the students were able to hang out for extended periods of time. However, these three PhD's took us under their wings, and we spent a lot of time together both in the lab and out.

We planned a nice big lunch for Sunday to celebrate our first week in Daejeon, and I think we all had a really good time.

I did a bit of exploration around Daejeon this weekend and found an acrobatics/taekwondo tricking studio by chance. They were holding a group lesson about half an hour after I arrived, so I had shown up at the perfect time. They brought me in and let me join the two hour practice for free.

While there, I met two Koreans who I had a fun time engaging with (thankfully, meeting them at a practice made it a lot easier to initiate conversation). One's name is Junsoung, or Jay - a 25 year old who is just finishing up his military service. He helped me do a backflip, and we got to bond over each others taste in music.

The other's name is Hojin - a 17 year old high schooler who has been practicing taekwondo for 11 years. He is already an instructor at his dojang, which I think is really impressive.

Below are some videos I scraped from my Instagram and posted on YouTube:

The taekwondoin at the studio were incredible. I had never seen anyone do such advanced aerial tricking on a trampoline, let alone on mats. They were jumping almost a meter into the air every flip and were able to do some amazing combinations.

Thankfully, they are also very supportive of one another. When someone would land the trick that they've been trying to work on, everyone would stop what they were doing and cheer that person on. They were very willing to give constructive criticism to one another to help each other grow.

I was surprised that many Koreans learn Hanja at a very young age, despite them not really needing to know it. Almost everything is written in Hangul, but the Hanja still will be used in things like newspapers or advertisements for additional emphasis.

In addition, I thought it was really cool that Korean people's given names are still determined by the Hanja their parents chose - even though they end up writing their names in Hangul anyways. I have gotten to know more about some of the students in the lab just by asking them what their Hanja is.

Before coming to Korea, I had thought that it would be relatively easy to meet Korean students (outside of HUBO lab) and interact with them. Instead, I learned how easy it is to cling to other international students when you do not know the language. It took me quite by surprise. I normally like putting myself in new situations, but after four or five days, I realized I had spent most of my time, comfortably, with other people fluent in English. I became confused as to why I was searching for that comfort of having other international students with me. And so my Sunday exploration around Daejeon came from wanting to learn more about the quirks of the city.

After meeting the students at the HUBO lab (who all have very good English), it was eye opening to see just how many people off campus spoke little to no English. Even so, most were incredibly welcoming despite my broken Korean.

After speaking with one of the lab employees, Mark, and receiving verification from KAIST's Dr. Oh, I will be working with the RB5 at the HUBO lab.

First, I will be creating a ROS wrapper for the RB5's PODO commands. There currently is no ROS support for the RB5, and so I will be helping out with the first wave of support. I am excited to learn more about the PODO framework, and it has been very interesting reading through the RB5's source code (which I am grateful to have received access to).

It has been useful to see how they use the QT framework to create their graphical user interface, and I also think it was useful to see how it can make system calls significantly easier to handle, even though it still is technically written in C++.

This wrapper project requires me to handle TCP/IP communications between the computer and the arm, and so I am excited to write this program from the base up.

Once we have the ROS wrapper for the PODO commands, I will work on sensor integration using an RGBD camera. That will be the next step, but thankfully ROS makes sensor integration much easier.