Author: Fausto Vega, Email: vegaf1@unlv.nevada.edu
Date Last Modified: 06/30/2019

This is a picture of the accident that happened this Friday. My dorm blew up. I chose this photo because I have never experienced anything like that before. Apparently it was a gas leak that caused the explosion, but luckily most of the people (including me) were evacuated because someone pulled the fire alarm. We were moved to another dorm, yet all my stuff is still in there, and I'm not sure if I am getting it back. I am currently just waiting on the status because I have food, clothes, and pretty much everything in there (including notes :/). It happened around 1pm on Friday and I was in the dorm eating lunch before going back to the lab when it happened.

This week I learned how to use open CV and coded a couple program for a webcam. The goal is to get the angle between the center of the camera and a pixel coordinate to then feed that angle to the laser scanner and pull the distance value of the array at that angle. Therefore the robot will know the distance between that object. The reason that we are not using Kinect is due to the limited 5m range. I finished the open cv program and then transformed it into ROS using an opencv bridge package on ROS. I also wrote these in Python which makes it a lot easier because you don't have to configure a CMake List. I also made a service for that program that will display the angle whenever the service is called. I am currently working on a subscriber that will subscribe to the pixel coordinates of the corners of the bounding boxes that appear in the YOLO program so that the program can calculate that specific angle. We will gather the angles of the two corners and the center of the box, then average them to reduce error.

For the majority of next week, I will be in Las Vegas due to a unexpected family emergency…

I learned that it is possible to learn a majority of things on YouTube or online resources. I started Open CV on Monday and completed the program on Tuesday. It is a useful resource with vast amounts of documentation on certain projects. Yet, the thing that is the most useful is the Open CV community which can help with errors. The same community exists for ROS, as a copy paste of an error can lead to a solution.

I also realized that computer science is a lot of googling. Someone has came up with the exact error that I've encountered which is nice. I've always thought that computer science was always coding from a blank document, yet a lot of it is editing existing code to ones project. This can be templates like ROS programs or even using open source packages for ones needs.

I met Dr. Louis' grad student Nick this week and we have setup a meeting for a VR demo for Monday (7/21). He is in his first year of his Phd and is completing it in computer science. His work includes the virtual environment for robots, and he will give me more detail whenever he presents the demo.