I learned a lot this week about organization, design, and the research process as a whole. At the beginning of the week, I got a decent amount done as far as getting the zone system working. This is part of the Define Zones program, the complement of the Map Registration program from last week. This involved a lot of organizing my code. So far, a zone is its own object and is stored in a list of zones. I’m still working out a way to export that list of points so that each is its own object. In the beginning, things were somewhat convoluted. If the order of classes was MainWindow->GraphicsScene -> ZoneHandler -> Zones, Points then I have an issue where I am passing things up to the main window and then passing them back down. I also don’t support more than 4 points yet, and I want to eventually move to the point where someone can define any number of points (thus “drawing” a shape around the zone they want to select). The user does not yet know what they have already created, so I think it is also important to be able to show all of the zones they have created so far.

I talked with Cindy about my problem, and she helped a lot as far as better figuring out what my organization should be. There are a lot of concepts like overloading paint functions that I would not have understood at the beginning of the program, but understand now. In a way, I really enjoy the projects and the lab here at OSU, but I still don’t feel like a roboticist. If I could work in an area like Human Robot Interaction or Graphical Interfaces like I am doing now, that would be preferred over the mechanical engineering side of robotics. I guess I just don’t feel like a “roboticist” yet.

We continue to communicate with our partners at Cornell about the project, and they have recently begun their pilot study. It’s interesting how important a pilot study is to a project. They came across various issues that they might not have had time to adjust for if they proceeded with the full study, and they have to make some pretty major changes. The study is difficult because performance is a difficult measure, especially with people as there are a number of things that can vary from person-to-person. I’ll have to keep that in mind when I do my own projects with HCI/HRI in the future.