June 26, 2009

So, if my update didn't give it away yesterday, our meeting the Professor Stoytchev really stressed me out. Don't get me wrong, I think he's a very great guy and I enjoy working with him, but I swear he's going to give me a heart attack. We decided to change the project to make it more feasible in our time limit. We took out vision, so now we're just using audio and proprioception, and we're going to use almost the exact same method as Jivko did in his paper. Yesterday after the meeting, I was so stressed I broke my stress ball and had pink, sticky goo all over. This, of course, didn't help my stress levels, but the walk/bus ride back to Freddy to change my pants (they were covered in goo) was actually very relaxing. I feel much better about this project and I think we have a higher chance of finishing. This morning I went over to the lab and spent the entire time troubleshooting a problem with serial port communication with the hand, only to realize that unplugging it and plugging it back in fixed it (face palm). Ah well. We've decided that I'm going to handle coding in C for the robot's movements and getting the proprioceptive data and Ugonna and Taylor are going to implement the audio stuff and the learning algorithms. I'll probably head back to the lab after journal club and work some more with the robot.

Oh, and by the way, does anybody know where I can get a new stress ball?