Outings

Since it was just a few days before his birthday, Ryoma decided to buy himself a present, particularly a plastic model for him to assemble back when he would be back at America. His labmates recommended that he go to a famous shop in Yongsan called the Gundam Base. However, he would not pick up his gift there. Rather, he would come to buy his present at the Takara model shop next door.

A diorama made of model kits of various german vehicles in front of the Takara shop.

A model of a mech in front of The Gundam Base, which is supposed to be the more famous of the two shops Ryoma visited that day.

A model of an F-18 Hornet jet fighter in front of the Tamiya shop. Ryoma would come to buy a model of this plane as a birthday present for himself.

Later that day, he joined the other Seoulites in the cohort at the National Museum of Korea to finish the day off.

A set of recreated ceremonial daggers from the bronze age. While real examples were on display, they were predictably heavily deteriorated, as expected of an item that was abandoned thousands of years ago.

A model of a Korean bronze age soldier.

Work

This week, Ryoma made serious strides in his task. He first implemented a simulated IntelⓇ Realsense™ D435i depth camera into a virtual robot testing environment called Gazebo, which allows for any piece of software that could work on a real robot to function in the simulated environment and vice versa. He would then attach the sensor onto a simple differential drive robot. While the robot is nowhere near as sophisticated as the robot he plans to implement his algorithms on, it should serve as an adequate testbed until he has access to the real robot.

The IntelⓇ Realsense™ D435i depth camera implemented in Gazebo. As was done with the real depth camera, the simulated camera can translate a 2D image to a 3D space, as can be seen with the dumpster and barricade models loaded into the simulation.

The differential robotic test platform with a depth camera.

Project Duckpot, a delivery robot being developed by the lab. While currently incomplete, Ryoma plans to implement the algorithms he will deliver on this robot.