Week 1: Summer goals, website building, docker and physical environment setup, SD card burning and departmental meeting

06/05/24

I kicked off the summer research by tuning in to Dr. Joy’s talk on unmasking AI, where she so thoughtfully and beautifully explained her research to us and how facial recognition was not her friend, mainly because she was not light skinned.

06/06/24

We got here bright and early to discuss our goals and how we were going to navigate the coming weeks with some updates regarding the Duckiebots and the software we were going to use. We evidently decided to create a lab website where we would document our individual progress as well as progress for the whole group to help other students in the future navigate this space.

06/10/2024

We had a little debrief session with out supervisor Diane, where we discussed the paper “Motion Planning: A Journey of Robots, Molecules, Digital Actors, and Other Artifacts” and went over Probabilistic Roadmaps(PRMs) and Rapidly- exploring Random Trees(RRTs). This gave us some insight of how to read a research paper, flesh out important information out of the ton and also to ask probable questions. This paper was written decades ago which was interesting as much of the world of technology has evolved since then.

06/11/2024

After a couple days, we were tasked to make some minor changes to the website to include more information on our personal pages as well as to make the home page more lively! This led to us changing the icons and backgrounds. We also modified the people page to include pictures of yourselves.

The bear behind the lab building did not stop us from gearing forward with the improvements on the website. So far, we have an active home page with a slideshow, added user interactions when a person’s picture is clicked to view their profile and a bold mission statement that captures the eyes of many.

Some progress with the software setup was made. After about an hour of setting up, we got stuck at some point because we did not know how the syntax worked but Diane came to our rescue and we persevered through that step of the setup. So far, we have created a docker account and gotten familiar with vim. Our next step will be to setup the SD card and name our duckiebots which is exciting!

06/12/2024

On to recurring departmental meetings. This week was our first departmental meeting where I got to meet with other Computer Science faculty and students doing research. The purpose of this meeting was to shine some light on our research for the summer as well as share progress and get to know one other more. Such a great idea!

For this week, we decided to spear ahead with the Ubuntu desktops to make things a bit easier for us since the MacOS was not going to be of much use in the future. We got a few desktops from LITS and started setting up their connections. Unfortunately, we hit a road block with that since the DisplayPort was not functioning correctly even though everything had been wired right. Someone is going to come and look at the soon!

We did have one computer which worked so we decided to start with that and due to that fact, we installed Microsoft Desktop to help facilitate working at different times virtually.

06/13/2024 – 06/18/2024

The process of going through the docker setup once more with Ubuntu was swift to say the least. All smiles until an error occurred with the SD card and with netifaces. Good thing we had the Duckietown slack and stack overflow. After asking the questions, we promptly got an answer and tried the solution listed. IT WORKED, after about 2 hours but STILL, it worked. So burning of the SD card has officially been done and we have successfully named the DB21J “rainduck”.

Afterward, there was another task at hand. Setting up the Duckietown physical environment. Rearranging our workspace was a must and there was no two ways about it because the physical environment was quite large and we had to set it up right in the middle of the lab because there was a configuration on the ceiling which would allow us to install cameras to observe the duckiebots later on. Only the mat was laid.