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Rohit, My First Week at the Berkeley Deep Drive Lab

My first day at my lab was generally straightforward, except for the location. Initially I expected my lab to be on Berkeley's campus a short ten minute walk away from my apartment that I will be sharing with Alan for the rest of my time at Berkeley. Just to make sure I was going to the right location I e-mailed my PI, Dr. Chan, to confirm what time and where he wanted to meet with me. Fortunately my PI responds to his emails quickly and informed me that I would actually need to go to the Richmond field station, which was 6 miles north and a twenty minute shuttle ride away. The Richmond field station was previously a naval base but has been an extension of the Berkeley campus since the 1950's. The field station is used by many of the Berkeley researchers that require additional space for testing as space in generally is limited on campus.


In terms of autonomous driving there are many different groups of researchers each working on different projects, Dr. Chan's team works with two Lincoln MKZ vehicles to collect raw real world data that could be used for further analysis and development of autonomous control algorithms. There is also another group of researchers that work directly with Hyundai and are working on developing a fully autonomous Hyundai vehicles, lastly there is another groups of researchers that are working on creating autonomous semi-trucks in a partnership with the Canadian DOT (department of transportation), US DOT and Volvo. 

Dr. Chan introduced me to the rest of his team which included a local high school student, two graduate students one from South Carolina and the other from France, three doctorate students, two from China and one also from France. I worked with Mr. Long Xin who was a doctorate student from China, he explained to me the current projects the lab was working on and recommend that I learn how to code in python so I could understand and help out with certain tasks. As a result I ended up spending my first week and a half working on learning how to code in python through an online tutorial. Although this made me feel as though I was completing a tedious task I understood that it was necessary for me to later help contribute to the lab's research. 



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