Author: Nathan Kassai, Email: kassan2@unlv.nevada.edu
Date Last Modified: 06/17/2024

For the first time in a while, our lab was full in person! Most people tend to work remotely, but this week, we got a chance to meet all developers at our lab for an intern meet & greet. I got a chance to meet with a man named Justin; he is a backend developer at the Remote Sensing Laboratory, dealing mainly with web & and app development. One of my projects involves rendering point cloud data to a website, and I had received a lot of help from Justin. His expertise, among many other individuals, has improved my pace of learning!

It has been interesting working at my first ever government position, but I think the highest culture shock has to be how critical it is to keep everything hush hush. At DASL, I feel we're actually encouraged to speak to others, whether its industry professionals, undergraduate and or graduate students, professors, etc, to enable collaboration or hope that our research brings value to other researchers. Even while on base, we're told that people are on a “need to know basis”; you don't need to know about our work unless there is a critical reason. Sometimes it feels a little like walking on eggshells, but of course, I understand.

I think the biggest lesson for me, was to always ask questions, regardless of how small I think they might be. Coming from DASL into RSL, I feel like I should be at a high enough level where I should figure out the answer myself for every problem I run into. However, I have so many people who are meant to be my mentors and tutors; why wouldn't I ask the person who can not only help me solve my problem, but also help me learn more at a faster rate? As an Intern, I am there to make mistakes and learn.

Last week, I had mentioned that I had been learning ROS 2 with C++, but this week, I have also started really getting deep into learning more about CMake with C++ and using Python with ROS 2. As I've previously mentioned in my blogs, I have been working a lot with rendering Point Cloud data via various Lidar sensors. In addition to that, I have been dealing with transform frames in ROS 2 to keep track of multiple coordinate frames in a visualization software known as RVIZ. I was attempting to do this with Hubo a while back, but was intimidated by it. Thanks to Martin for his knowledge in ROS, I have been able to work more comfortably with transforms and CMake in a variety of my projects. With this, the end goal involves meshing together multiple clouds based on their given transforms. Some of the work is shown below. (Adding picture soon!)