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...