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Week 7: July 8th- July 12th
This week started out kinda rough. I was very sick all Sunday, throwing up from a stomach bug. So on Monday I was wiped out. I worked on comparing the error between discrete learning and continous learning for the quadrotor. Discrete learning can be considered as the agent, in this case our quadrotor, stoping every short distance and assessing the situation before it makes its next move. It is very long and tedious and basically consists of hard crunching every possible action. Continous learning is when the agent is continually assessing the situation and using that information collectively to get an average next best move. Well, at least this is the way I understand it. It took me pretty much all day to do this because I wasn't completely certain about what I was doing. Sandra helped guide me along the correct path and eventually I figured it out. Now I have some funky looking graphs that compare the discrete error to the continous error. I am so grateful that I have been working on Sandra's research and that she has been the one helping me out. I don't think anyone else would have been near as supportive or helpful as she has been. I am very grateful that she as also been so patient with me.
Tuesday I felt much better. I spent the entire day working on my final report. I got my intro, purpose of reserch, and related works sections done. I was on a roll and writting my priliminary work section when I ran into an issue adding a figure. I am working in LaTex (well trying to learn LaTex) and it is proving to be very difficult. I am still using the Vi editor and I've gotten much better at that, but at the same time I am still having trouble with Unix commands (hence the problem adding the figure). Writting this final paper is proving very difficult because I am just not sure what to write. It's not like I have been conducting experiments that have a clear outcome one way or another. Mostly, I just have a bunch of graphs, with a bunch of points, that I don't really know how to assess. Also, what to I write for my methods? Um...."I plugged a bunch of numbers into Matlab"? That doesn't sound good, but that kinda what I did. I guess we will see how much progress I can make in the next few weeks.
Sidenote: I went to an Albuquerque Isotopes game last night and it was so much fun. The weather was perfect and the 'Topes played a great game. I was also with amazing company and we got to sit in one of the Suites. (All my friends work there so they get special perks) I couldn't have imagined a more enjoyable evening.
The rest of the week was busy working on my report, editing the bibliography file and fixing the code to produce better graphs. I was able to get a good portion of my report done this week which was good because I was really worried about it. I wrote my introduction, purpose of reasearch, related works, and preliminaries sections. I also began working on the methods section. Hopefully next week I can have someone look over what I've written to see if I am on the correct path. I will probably have another final-report-panic-attack next weeek but I will continue to keep working on it. On Friday I sat down with Sandra and we debugged my code and were able to create some really cool looking graphs. I will attempt to analyze these graphs and make some commentary on the error. Friday was a long day made even longer by a headache that kept me from being too productive. It is hard to stay motivated and engaged while staring at a monitor all day, especially if you have a headache.
Leisure Time I really enjoyed going to the baseball game this week. I think it is my favorite thing that I've done in Albuquerque this summer. Besides that I didn't do much. Last Saturday I finished the 4th Game of Thrones book so I bought Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol. I have been completely sucked in and can't put it down. It is so good. I also went home this weekend. On Saturday my family and I went to a family friend's graduation party. It was really nice to see all these people I had grown up with and catch up.
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