Author: Yu Hang He, Email: hey6@unlv.nevada.edu
Date Last Modified: 09/23/2019

This week, I met with some more interns from Tesla, Owen Crooks and Junhao Dong. We went to an Oktoberfest near lake Tahoe. The weather at Lake Tahoe was amazing and we spent the afternoon enjoying the music, food, festival, and games. I have never attended a German drinking festival before so it was a fascinating experience. I witnessed a Steinholding competition and it was quite exciting. I learned about Owen, who is an industrial engineering intern, and Junhao, a packaging engineering intern. Both of them started their internships recently.

There was quite a bit of pressure this week, since I need to make sure all the components are working before shipping them to Buffalo. However, I managed to pull through have everything ready for the test run next week. Hopefully, everything went well and nothing is damaged or broken. Both Spot and laser scanner are very expensive. Knock on wood.

It was rather abrupt, but Matt scheduled with Boston Dynamic to have Spot doing a test run at the factory in Buffalo, NY with the laser scanner next week. I have to make sure that Spot is capable of carrying the laser scanner and ready to be operated this week. I was able to manufacture the laser scanner mount and roll-cage using the machine shop. I was able to successfully mount the laser scanner and roll-cage onto the Spot and tested its walking capability. Comparing to the Spot without any payloads, the combined weight of laser scanner and mounts caused the Spot's walking to be less stable. However, considering that around 1/4 of Spot's body weight was added as payload, it is very impressive how little impact it has. Furthermore, Boston Dynamic promised to improve their walking algorithm by allowing users to specify payloads weights and locations in the future. Furthermore, using Faro's API, I was able to remotely program the laser scanner to start a scanning process. The Wifi on Spot was used as an access point. Both my workstation and laser scanner was connected to the access point. I was able to control Spot and laser scanner simultaneously.

Next Thursday, Matt will be at Buffalo, NY with an personnel from Boston Dynamic to test Spot's capability. Before that, I need to document and debugging my GUI to make sure that Matt will be able to control Spot and the laser scanner successfully. In addition, I want to work on implementing a communication channel between the laser scanner and Spot so that they can communicate with each other.