Author: Fausto Vega, Email: vegaf1@unlv.nevada.edu
Date Last Modified: 07/20/2019

This is a picture of another robot that they have in the lab. It is the Nao robot which is similar to the Darwin OP that we have in the lab. In my opinion, the Darwin is better because of the MX-28 dynamixel actuators. Well I haven't seen any demo's with the Nao because none of them are currently working. They usually just turn it on during demo's and it has a default program that makes it keep eye contact with anyone in range. Something that I have noticed is that during the summer, the Socially Assistive Robotics Group Lab (SARG) has tours every week. Usually the tours consist of orientation students or summer camp students. Yet, the do not have any demos prepared for the students which makes half of them uninterested during the tour. I believe that DASL has a good set of demos that can impress students that want to get into robotics.

I finished the service and the subscriber to the bounding boxes. I have also learned to access the data from the laser scanner array. Therefore, the next step is to publish this angle to a laser scanner node that accesses the distance value at that angle which will let the robot localize the obstacles in its path. I have also been working on the paper deliverable that is required from the REU. So far, I have the intro, related work, and methods sections complete. The goal for this week to to get the Pioneer running with a navigation stack (or if there is not an existing one on ROS, then I'd have to configure an existing nav stack of another robot). Another goal is to compile everything into a launch file.

I learned that the only way to learn ROS is by working with it. The only experience I had with it was in Keitaro's class learning turtle sim. Yet, after that I have not used it for any projects.

I also learned that I can catch on to things quick. I did not know anything about open cv and now I understand the basics, the same goes with python.

I did not have a chance to meet anyone new this week due to most of it being spent in Las Vegas.