For the first week, we focused purely on reading research articles cited by and cited within an article written by Joshua P. Hecker and Melanie E. Moses called Beyond Pheromones. This has been a great launching platform for learning about research in our field. We will be working on the Swarm Robotics platform that Moses and Hecker developed for NASA Swarmathon, and as such, this article gave great insight into their way of thinking. Going up and down the chain of research surrounding this one article also gave us a decent perspective into research in this field, specifically, how it is done, what some of the challenges are, and some of the obstacles my team will be facing.
About the team, I haven’t really talked much about the people I am working with. I was surprised to find them to all be around the same age as me (given that I am a 30 year old undergrad… it is great to see I’m not the only one!) and three of the four of them are also undergraduates. The three other undergraduates are all participants in a local REU called Summer SURFer program that is offered through their school. The fourth is a grad student who is simply here for the experience, and surprisingly enough, he’s the youngest among us. One of my fellow undergrads was a participant in the NASA Swarmathon this year, and as such is familiar with the platform. We have been slowly educating the other three on its operation when we need a break from all the reading we are doing for research.
Since there are five of us in total, we have broken down our pject into five specific tasks. Each fellow will develop an algorithm for their specific task covers a field in swarm robotics and our job will be tailoring them to the NASA Swarmathon competition and platform. The tasks are find home, pick up, drop off, obstacle avoidance, and the state machine. We are not worried about searching, and if we have time we will play with it a bit. However, as a collective, we believe that we must have a solid foundation before focusing on search and our foundation is the five things we listed above. Of the five tasks mine is the State Machine.
While our research in the first week was focused on going up and down the chain of the Beyond Pheromones article, the second week has all been about State Machines. And let me just say, I’ve learned a lot. I already have plans for the information I’ve learned so far, and now plan to augment the current program that operates the payload on my HASP project to use a State Machine. The goal is to bring a higher level of efficiency to each iteration of the programs operation, which is something I have been internally struggling with lately. The program works, but it is time to make it better. This is the internal struggle of the artful programmer, “make it work, then make it good. Refactor, refactor, refactor.”