Last week was a struggle for me and needless to say this one was even more challenging. After brushing up on my C++ and redoing all the ROS tutorials to refresh myself for my task, I went to my grad student Venkat to tell him that I was ready to move on to my task that I would be working on for the next month or so. Unfortunately, this task was going to be in three crucial parts. The first part would be to tell the robot to take a 3D picture with a Kinect and then convert that picture into a point cloud, which was the main method of 3D object representation. Next, I would need to filter the point cloud so that it only represented the object that I wanted to model. Finally, I have to figure out how to turn the point cloud representation into a 3D object file. This file would be passed onto one of the other interns, who would do their respective tasks with the object file. The problem is I had just learned ROS and now I was expected to write a complete program. To make matters worse, as soon as Venkat told me this information, he had to leave for Berlin to compete in the Amazon Picking Challenge along with Dr. Likhachev and Andrew, the coding genius. That meant that the only other resources I had at that point were the two interns Joe and Shivam. They firstly reassured me that I would pick it up eventually like they had done. That made my early struggles seem a bit smaller in perspective. Then, they gave me advice, such as how to setup the rough draft I would need to show Venkat when he returned, and taught me about the incredible powers of googling.
Research on ROS Nodes
Now thanks to their help and that of the vast resources of code on the internet (seriously, googling was way more helpful than I expected), I have a decent idea of what my program will look like. On the more relaxed side of things, I decided to explore the city a little more. I haven't seen the vast Carnegie museums yet, but with my family visiting this weekend I'll be able to make room for that. Additionally, I went out to lunch a lot with the other people in the lab, and some of their friends, and tried out a bunch of new places, such as the cafe (don't know what it's called), Orient Express, a really good asian food place, and the salad bar. I also did a lot of relaxing and watching of baseball, which was really torturous to see this month. Hopefully with Venkat coming back next week I'll finally be able to make some big strides, and I also hope that I can get out in the city more.
A Red Sox shirt I had ordered in the mail last week
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