Author: Yehyun Lee, Email: leey93@unlv.nevada.edu
Date Last Modified: 03/02/2025

This week was an emotional rollercoaster. One morning, I was thrilled after finally solving a problem that had taken a lot of effort. But by the afternoon, a new and even bigger issue appeared, leaving me feeling completely discouraged. Later that night, when that problem was also resolved, my mood swung back again—it felt almost comical how many emotions I experienced in just one day. It made me realize how much of myself I'm putting into this work, and how unforgettable the joy of solving a problem can be. I hope next week brings more of those rewarding moments.

Through Hawon, who interns in Dr. Qi's robotics lab, I got to meet two Ph.D. students from her lab, Anson and Harith, along with their friends Nijo and Sylvia. Anson and Harith are roommates and kindly invited us to their dorm, where we got to enjoy some amazing homemade Indian food. Anson also shared details about his research on surgical robots and showed us a video of an actual surgery where the robot was used by a surgeon. It was fascinating to see how engineering and medicine can work together to support life-saving procedures. The experience reminded me of the meaningful impact engineering can have, and it made me feel even more motivated about the field I’m studying.

When I meet new friends here, they often don’t realize right away that I’m an exchange student from Korea. Most people assume I’m just a regular student until I mention it, which surprised me at first. I think this is because the U.S. has such a diverse population that people don't automatically assume someone is from another country just because of their appearance. In Korea, if someone doesn’t look East Asian, they are almost always seen as a foreigner, so this difference stood out to me. But at the same time, I noticed something else: despite the diversity here, people at the dining commons often tend to stick with others from similar backgrounds. It feels like the campus is both mixed and separated at the same time, which has been interesting to observe.

I’ve started to realize that I’m slowly growing. It’s already been about a month and a half since I arrived, and what felt overwhelming at first is now starting to feel more manageable. Tasks that used to drain my energy have become part of my routine, and spending long hours in the lab, which once felt unfamiliar, now feels completely normal. Even outside of work, I can see the progress. When I first started going to the gym, I struggled to last 10 minutes on the stair machine, but now I can do 20 minutes with no problem. I once heard that doing something consistently for three months can turn it into a habit. With that in mind, I hope to keep this momentum going and continue building good habits along the way.

This week, I successfully transferred the settings and parameters from my MATLAB Simulink simulation to the actual drone. With this, I am now able to run the same inputs on both the simulation and the real drone to compare their behavior. Koreen and I performed motion capture (MoCap) to check whether the drone's actual movement matched the simulation. We wrote scripts in ROS and Python to collect position data (x, y, z) and visualize the flight trajectory through plots for analysis.

During testing, the drone's altitude was consistently lower than expected, so I adjusted the controller block in Simulink. After the update, the drone now responds more accurately to the inputs. Next week, we plan to run another MoCap session to verify the improvements through a detailed comparison.