Author: Yu Hang He, Email: hey6@unlv.nevada.edu
Date Last Modified: 09/30/2019

This week, I attended a FIRST Robotic Competition(FRC) workshop in Reno hosted by FRC team 5480 FYRE. During the workshop, I have the opportunity to meet Kerry Thompson and Michael Holfelner. Kerry is the coach for team 5480 FYRE for 6 years. Her team is the longest lasting FRC team in Reno. Kerry hosted the workshop and invited other FIRST members in the community to join. Michael Holfelner is a controls design engineer at Tesla. He volunteered to mentor FRC teams to help the students. Last year, he volunteered to mentoring two teams at the same time. The FRC workshop teaching material was mostly organized by Michael himself. I am very impressed with his dedication and his willingness to volunteer his time to help the community. I decided to volunteer my time to help the FRC teams in Reno whenever possible during my time here at Reno.

It has been a while since I contacted the FRC community. The reason that I became passionate in the field of robotic was because of my experience in FRC in high school. After attending the Tesla FIRST Volunteer Info Session last week and attending the workshop this week, I am reminded of reason I fallen in love with robotic and STEM. The excitement of these students inspired me to volunteer my time and help mentoring them during my time here in Tesla.

This week, I focused on ensuring that my desktop application for Spot can run without any problem. The Spot will have its first test at Buffalo, NY. We will mount the Faro Laser Scanner on top of Spot using the mount and roll cage that I designed and manufactured. The Spot will be controlled using the application that I wrote with Boston Dynamic's API. I could not be in Buffalo physically for the testing unfortunately and I only heard the results from Matt. My desktop application worked without major problem. However, they were having trouble putting on the Spot mount. The tapped thread on the mount became a major headache for assembly. In the future design, I will need to avoid using tapped thread and make the roll cage more secure. The Spot did not crash or fall down during the scanning process and there was no damage to the laser scanner. In addition to the test scan in Buffalo, I update the feature on my desktop application to include control for Faro scanner and more mobility options for Spot during locomotion.

Next week, I will analyze the quality of laser scan taken by Spot at Buffalo NY. Hopefully, the lower elevation of Spot and the footprint of roll cage will not have a major negative impact on the quality of laser scanner. Depending on the result, I will redesign my roll cage. In addition, I will start looking into other payload options for Spot. Such as 360 cameras, projectors, or RGB-D camera.