Peddie EXP Summer 2018

I was given the project of web development. I would create simulations of various search algorithms such as Dijsktra, A*, and Weighted A*, and in the end, hopefully upload them to my lab's website. Over the past week, I spent a lot of time reading articles on the inner workings of these algorithms and even more complex extensions of them- algorithms like ARA* and Multi-Heuristic A*. Once understood, these algorithms all seem very intuitive in nature and follow a clear logical process (like Djisktra is just repetitively adding the closest neighboring node to a final set of nodes and then updating the neighboring nodes' distance values), but writing them in code isn't simple for me. I've also been using data structures that I haven't touched before, such as priority queues. I tried my hand at implementing A* and Djisktra in Java, and will soon convert my code into Javascript so that it can work as part of a Javascript applet and be used on the web.

I had no idea that Pennsylvania is this wide. Within the first hour, my train had reached Philly. But to Pittsburgh, it took another seven. Even before I stepped foot into the Search-Based Planning Lab, I was waylaid by some anxious news. The PhD student assigned to be my mentor, Dhruv, texted me that he, Dr. Likhachev, and most of the lab would be out of town for the entire week. So that was that. Fortunately, it was my first week, the week to be spent learning new material, and Dhruv provided me with plenty to digest. I already had ROS (Robot Operating System) installed, so I looked towards the tutorials that ROS provided. I copied commands into my Linux laptop's terminal to run ROS features. I learned the basic structure of ROS: packages, services and clients, publishers and subscribers, messages, nodes, and topics (which nodes communicate messages over). There was one simple yet interesting program I came across in the tutorials called turtlesim, for which using only 2 comm...