Peddie EXP Summer 2018

You could hear a pin drop in the Lab the week of July 4th; It was quiet week but a productive week for me. Almost everyone was out for vacation and celebration, but the calm gave me the time to advance my primary literature reading, helping me analyze our experiments from another angle. I watched firework shows in town and attended a few car shows. Freedom was in the Michigan air on the 4th (displayed below). This past weekend, I also went to another signature car show that is held annually in downtown Ann Arbor. They closed off 3 busy streets and filled them with cars ranging from antique automobiles and modern sports cars. I was most impressed by this firetruck red late 2nd gen camaro stock car. Beyond the cars, I have a huge update on my laser experiment. This week, Grace and I focused on realigning the optics setup to eliminate the back reflection of the laser that was being projected from the two ends of the rubidium cell (wrapped in orange heat tape ...

So I extended my stay at the lab for two weeks, making my last day the end of July. I met with Dr. Likhachev a few more times, mostly in lab meetings. It seems that every week, there is at least one lab meeting, where, up to now, a PhD student in the lab gives a presentation on his proposal. The presentations have all been about 3D path finding in unknown environments and its application to robots. After having worked with some search algorithms myself, I had a pretty good general idea of what the big dudes were talking about. Words that were just buzz phrases weeks ago are now entire comprehensible concepts to me. I've successfully translated my A* code from Java into Javascript, though the process probably took a bit longer than it should have- I spent too long looking for an error that existed in the form of a misplaced bracket in a nested for-loop. I've also created my first copy of the algorithm's visualization. It's a Javascript applet, meaning the html file h...