Author: Yu Hang He, Email: hey6@unlv.nevada.edu
Date Last Modified: 07/23/2018

This week, I had the opportunity to visit Chungnam National University in South Korea. The CNU campus is about 45 minutes walk away from the KAIST campus. Similar to KAIST, CNU campus is another beautiful campus with scenic walkways and plentiful of art exhibits along the path. I learned that there are many exchange students in CNU because they have a language school for learning Korean attached to the university.

Right between KAIST and CNU is a popular shopping and dining district called Gungdong. The district is popular for both KAIST and CNU students and professors because it is right around the corner. The district have many different styles of restaurants available from traditional Korean foods to Japanese and Western foods. There are also many different stores and entertainments. I went to restaurants in Gungdong on several occasions. The foods were delicious.

I met two graduate students studying electrical engineering in front the KAIST library. Their name is DongSun and MunHee. They have no problem with conversing in English with me. The two students are researching on the topic of radio frequency and circuit board. We enjoyed a nice conversation where they ask about American culture and I ask them about Korean culture. I found that most Koreans are fascinated with American culture.

During my first week in Korea, I visited Korean National Folk Museum in Seoul and Daejeon Museum of Art. I learned that Koreans have a deep appreciation of their traditional cultures. In addition, I was surprised to found out how much Chinese cultures impacted ancient Korean culture. Calligraphy is a form of art that is deeply appreciated in many Asian countries and Korea is no exception. In Daejeon Museum of Art, there is a whole section dedicated to calligraphy. The writings are composed of both Korean characters and traditional Chinese characters.

Since this is the first I travel, I learn that I quite enjoy traveling and sight seeing. Especially, I like to learn more about different cultures and traditions. I also discovered that nightlife does not appeal to me personally.

Last week, I tried to implement the inverse kinematic function into my mocap project. However, after some trial and error, I realized that the available inverse kinematic are not suitable for for this project. After consideration, I decided to implement the inverse kinematic function outlined in the paper by Shinichiro Nakaoka]].

Currently, the new inverse kinematic function takes three positional inputs at shoulder, elbow, and wrist to calculate joint position at shoulder pitch, yaw, roll and elbow. The new inverse kinematic function are much better suited to imitate motion captured through mocap systems. Furthermore, I can attach additional markers in future experiments to calculate wrist pitch and yaw positions.

Additionally, I implement the filtering functions directly into the Hubo 2's PODO ALPrograms. The new ALProgram will directly parses the positional data captured through mocap system and filter and convert them into joint positional data. The filter implemented in this project is locally weighted scatterplot smoothing method, which I found to be most robust and accurate in filtering both the trajectory and joint data.