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. 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 I get stressed out with computer science in general, but that I should just be patient as the end results will come. With so many errors in the code, I spend most of the time debugging the code, yet by doing this I learn the proper structure and will avoid making the same mistake in the future. Overall it is making me a stronger engineer as most ME's do not go through a programming class.

I have also learned that I try to figure out the problem myself and stay stuck for a couple of days instead of asking for help. Yet, it is good to ask for as there is a set timeline for the project, and the more progress, the better. It is not like I am asking for them to do the project for me, yet just guidance in the right direction. That is something I need to do whenever I spend too long for a problem.

I met Dr. Louis this week and he gave me an introduction on his work. It involves Unity with Dr. La's bridge inspection robot. His grad student was out of town, so I will get to see a demo this upcoming Friday and will include it in the next blog.