Long time no see… Things have been hectic in last 2 months. While I had a pretty good plan for the August and October, an unexpected internship opportunity in the US showed up. Thins like Visa interview and accommodation was almost a blocker, but I was able to dealt with them. I was lucky that I was qualified for an “Urgency Visa”.
Anyway, in the month of September, I was an intern in a university, and worked on several scientific projects. The lab that I worked at was mainly working on autonomous systems, and path planning algorithms. There I had studied those algorithms a bit and also involved in software design for several projects.
As soon as I went there, I found myself in an atmosphere of competition. The competition was about designing an algorithm so that the drone we own can go from one point to another without crashing any other drones or obstacles in the stage. The behavior of those drones was semi-stochastic and depending on that preknowledge given to us, we are asked to implement this algorithm. Even though we couldn’t make into competition, I can say that I learnt a lot.
My first task was to implement this semi-stochastic behaviors of enemy drones. It was pretty fun, and it taught me how seemingly easy thing can contain a lot of challenges. While dealing with this stuff, i learnt some other stuff regarding to games, which i hope to blog about.
Here is the work that I had after a short while
My other task was to implement a 2D visualizer for the drones. The data was coming from a system know as Vicon which is used to track objects. It could give the orientation data with up to 1 cm precision, which was pretty cool. This task took only a few days and it was easy.
In the last few weeks, while dealing with other minor tasks, like programming the rover, or fixing bugs in our competition code, I started designing a 3D visualizer using XNA for the lab as a hobby project. Below is a view from one of the cameras. There are several other cameras and also a dirty console implementation.
The future of this project is more likely to be a simulator, with a physics engine.
Nowadays, I am really busy with doing homeworks and getting ready for graduate school applications. They take a lot of time and a lot of money (standardized tests like TOEFL, GRE). I hope to blog about those too.
I hope this feature will be my boost post, and i hope to continue blogging regularly.
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