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====== Ethan Nowery NIST Journal 10 ======

**Author: ** Ethan Nowery, Email: <nowery@unlv.nevada.edu>
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**Date Last Modified: ** 08/11/2024
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===== Week 10 =====
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==== Photo of the Week ====
{{spot_crate_room.mp4? 600|}}
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This week was spent preparing for my presentation. I had some videos that I wanted to show of Spot throughout the courses we made this summer. This is one of those videos. This is what we call a complex crate terrain, nicknamed "X" Crate Room, for its X configuration through the center. This room has 3 different elevations to it, with a difference of 6inches each. The X pattern in the room creates ridges that the robot has to then cross to get to its target. We can put tasks in the middle of the room (like in the video) or in the 4 corners. The position of the task in the middle of the room is set so that the robot has to get on top of each ridge in order to be lined up with the task, thus pushing the robot over the ridges, through the valleys, over the voids, and around the center. 
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==== New Person ====
On Wednesday this past week, I had to present to my division about my summer project. Here I met several higher ups in the Intelligent Systems Division such as Kevin Burrens, who is the director. This presentation was good practice for next week when I have to present with the rest of the interns for our Colloquium. I got a lot of good feedback, mostly about design choices on my slides that worked or didn't work based off the audience's perspective. 

==== Cultural Insight ====
It's amazing how many different projects there are at NIST. There are projects that range from all aspects of STEM. Some examples, there is a project about researching microplastics in facial creams, researching a way for pill capsules to be 3D printable for medicinal purposes, and even a project researching ways to integrate industrial robots with a better software system (like implementing ROS). There really is a little bit of everything here at NIST.

==== Lesson of the Week ====
Similar to Nathan's blog last week, I learned to video everything. As I was putting my presentation together there were a couple videos or pictures that I realized I wanted but didn't have. There were a couple times where I would already run a trial or run Spot through a course and then afterwards remember to record it. So, lesson of the year is to record everything!

==== Technical Projects ====
As the internship comes to an end, so does my projects. I have pretty much wrapped them up already. There are a couple things here and there that I would like to test out before I leave just to say that it's been tested. An example is that I want to take Spot down a flight of obstructed stairs to see if it will even go down.