Author: Nathan Kassai, Email: kassan2@unlv.nevada.edu
Date Last Modified: 06/07/2024
Over the course of the past few weeks, I have had the delight of meeting many of my new mentors & managers that I'd be working with for the summer. One person that definitely stood out to me was my mentor Martin; he's currently finishing up his PhD at UNLV, and is such a phenomenal robotics engineer! The project Francis and I were put on has been worked on entirely by Martin with the assistance of another member of their lab. Any issue he runs into is solved within seconds, manages nearly every aspect of such a large project, while ALSO putting in the time for his PhD program and the lab he works on campus. For the first week, he's been providing resources/tools to Francis and I for software to learn such as ROS 2 and GIT while giving us side projects to complete. I am grateful to have someone as intelligent and helpful as Martin to help us learn how to be better roboticists and researchers.
One of the greatest parts of working at DASL is that we have 24 hour/7 days a week access; working at RSL, that doesn't exist. It's a strict schedule from 7am-5pm, 4 days a week, and nothing more. When I had asked what work I should do over the weekend/what should I begin studying for, they looked at me with confusion and replied with “not worry about work”. While this feels frustrating, as work that I could complete would have to wait until the next day, or until after the weekend, it forces me to be as efficient with the time that I am given throughout the week.
Furthermore, I have been spending some time learning Git, a version control system capable of saving “snapshots” of coding projects, which many people at RSL use. Learning how to properly use Git and even host a remote server capable of storing multiple projects with their entire respective version history, has been a huge game changer in terms of efficiently storing/retrieving old/new projects. This is something I'd definitely love to have integrated in our lab.
Due to the nature of our work, we are not in possession of our phones throughout our time at RSL. This has become a problem as I use my phone as a personal notebook, reminder, storage, etc. Making the shift from using my phone to a personal notebook that I carry everywhere, has actually made book-keeping everything a whole lot easier. This also forces me to write down everything whether that's notes for a project, reminders, etc, as I have a pretty poor memory.
Similarly with Francis, due to all the papers and documents signed, I am not allowed to disclose what projects that I have been working on and this is further reinforced by both my manager and supervisor. What I can say is that I have been spending a lot of time learning how to use ROS2 as well as a popular SLAM library known as RTAB-Map. Similar to the work I had done with Zahir's Cable-Driven Parallel Robot, I have been working on integrating RTAB-Map's functionality with a LiDAR camera in ROS2 instead of ROS1, which definitely has been a big leap.