My summer experience at the University of Minnesota ~ Sara Lahr

Journal

Week 4: June 14 - June 20

This week was very eventful. Monday was the Robotics Mixer. A couple of graduate students organized a day full of sharing results and spreading ideas in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence. There were over fifteen presentations throughout the day. While this was an enormous amount of information to absorb, I enjoyed hearing about the different projects the grad students were working on.


Tuesday was our weekly Scribbler meeting. To stimulate ideas about what we want to do with the Scribblers, we have been reading relevant papers. I led the discussion on "The Giving Tree: Constructing trees for efficient offline and online multi-robot coverage'' by Agmon et al. I had enjoyed the paper; the authors had clear algorithms and proofs, and I thought that the use of minimum spanning trees was a nice idea. During the discussion, I had a slight revelation. I had had no experience with robots prior to this summer, but they were always something I had been interested in. Prof. Gini pointed out that the paper was written by computer scientists, not robotists. I had not made the distinction until that point. While the algorithm was nice and theoretically complete, it was not the most practical algorithm for robot dispersion. The limitations of the robots' hardware made the completion of some of the steps in the algorithm unlikely. While I understand the source of the limitations, I find that I still become slightly frustrated by having to adjust my ideas to fit the limited capabilities of the robots. I am much more of a computer scientist than a robotist.


I spent much of the week working with the Sony Aibo robots. We hosted a small workshop for a group of high school students on Friday. Elizabeth, Mike, and I were charged with presenting the Aibos. The week was spent in preparation by making sure the tutorial was accurate and configuring the computers and memory sticks. The day went well; some students were more engaged than others, but I think they had a good time programming the Aibos. I hope the day stimulated their interest in computer science or at least in further education.