Week 10 (July 31 - August 6)

This week we put the finishing touches on our Virtual Waiting Service. The goal was to have a teleoperator at home control the robot to successfully place an order at a restaurant with free wifi. However, we ran into a huge problem with Internet issues and networking problems. The wifi we tested at various places (Starbucks, Burger King, Peets Coffee, McDonald's, and Subway) did not allow the signals that we needed to connect the rosbridge. It was possible that the bandwidth was not large enough, too many people were using the network, the network was port blocking (the rosbridge connection uses port 9090 and the PS3 camera stream uses port 8080), and the fact that the wifi at the beach house was a private network. Whatever the problem was, we would have had to contact the company's Internet Service Provider to figure it out so we tried some other ideas. We even tested our project it with a Verizon Wireless Internet Hotspot, but that didn't work because it didn't have enough bandwith to handle the 3-4 video feeds and the rosbridge messages being sent back and forth. We finally ended up going to the Pacifica Public Library to do a demo of our robot checking out a book. The library had the appropriate network settings and everything worked correctly.

During our last week in California, we also took some time to enjoy San Francisco. We were able to go to a San Francisco Giants baseball game on Thursday. On Friday we packed and cleaned up our cottage and on Saturday we just hung out in San Francisco. My flight back home was on Sunday afternoon.

I really enjoyed the DREU experience this summer. I learned a lot about robotics and how to program in different languages such as Python, ROS, Linux, and Javascript. I also learned more about research and what it takes to succeed in Computer Science, whether in the workplace at a top-tier programming company like the sites we visited around Silicon Valley or in graduate school. The final report of my summer experience can be seen here and thanks for visiting my site!