Currently, there are a number of personal and academic projects that I am working on to keep my skills sharp and learn new things. On the more professional side of things, I am dedicating a lot of time to learning more about Unity, data analytics, simulation software, web development (you are looking at some of the results of that currently), and a couple of other projects in robotics and virtual reality. In the past month, I have worked on a UAV (unmanned ariel vehicle) project, an AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle, a VR project, and this web page among other things. This has forced me to get my feet wet with quite a few different software products and learn the quirks of developing software in a large range of fields.
For the next couple of weeks, I want to use what I have learned to refine some of my projects into more usable and robust products. This comes in the form of pausing development on a couple of the projects and focusing more heavily on a couple of other projects. The project that I am most worried about is the Robosub AUV as I would like to fully commit my time to learning Robot Operating System (ROS2) and the old software that is currently being used on the sub that will be competing this year. As the software lead for this year’s competition I need to be able to understand and use the software in its entirety (quite a tall task as this year’s team could barely understand what was going on in the software), while also thinking about what needs to be improved for next year’s sub. This will come in the form of practicing making computer vision (CV) models for the sub so that in the case that we come across the same buoys and gates (obstacles for the sub to navigate through/around) we can use pre-existing data to train the CV model on. This will allow us to build our model on even more training data as the main weakness in using computer vision in the competition is that we will not have enough training data to build a robust CV model.
Focusing on the Robosub it will allow me to get more practice in deploying CV software to autonomous vehicles which should directly translate to the UAV project. However, to continue work on the UAV project I need a physical UAV to start testing. That means I need to cross the hurdles of relearning 3d modeling software and getting parts for the model printed/ordered. So while I will be learning the software side of this project through the Robosub project I will need to hold off on building physical models for a month to focus more on Computer Vision and school.
On the more personal side of the projects that I have been working on I am excited for the garden I have been growing, and I have a lot of home decor/renovation projects that I can focus on. I finally have gotten pallets for a planter box broken down and de-nailed. I have a general plan for the design of the planter and have a good amount of progress on getting the materials for the planter. Most of the wood for the project is just scrap wood from others to keep the costs down, hence the pallet wood.
Pictures from the Garden Project
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