This week, we had our poster presentation. It was really exciting seeing everyone’s poster and having people ask me about mine. Although it is not done, I think we have made a significant amount of progress and I am proud of the work.

This week, I have been experimenting and debugging. I am also making graphs and pictures for my poster.

This week, I started experimenting! I have been working on making an environment and writing a script to make running experiments faster. I also started working on my poster.

This week, I thought I would be working on experimenting but we had some ideas to implement that would make the code better, so I made those updates instead. Firstly, I added two variables that could separately control the number of samples per free and obstacle annuli. I added an obstacle ball re-expansion method as before there was only one for free balls and I added an obstacle ball re-expansion that would re-expand the k largest balls.

This week, I have some very exciting news: I fixed everything! The re-expand ball method works and the strategy compiles and runs! This is great because I can now start experimenting!

This week, as per usual, we had two meetings to share updates about our project. I added a method to check whether a point is in a sphere, and in that case, which sphere. The strategy also compiles once integrated, however, I am now debugging the method that re-expands the ball.

This week, I once again presented my update on slides for the entire cohort. I heard feedback from others and was able to incorporate that into my work.

This week, I finished updating this website, and added myself to the Parasol Lab website. This website helped me work on my writing skills, as I had to be concise when describing myself and my project. As well, in two of the meetings we had this week, I created slides to present the updates on my project to the team, which helped me consolidate my thoughts into one place.

This week, we had five group meetings, two crash courses, two whole lab meetings and one for the CS Summer Research program through UIUC. During the crash courses, we learned about the different algorithms, PRM and RRT, and their different variations. In the first lab meeting, we each gave our updates on our individual projects and in the second lab meeting we discussed a potential project to hear about the next week The CS Summer Research program gave us food while we listened to a presentation about how to conduct research.

The first week of the DREU program began with a couple of meetings. The first meeting was with the graduate student, Stav Ashur, I will be working with. Since this project is one I already started on in the previous semester, we discussed the next steps that we needed to accomplish. The roadmap we are creating for this project has balls of free and obstacle space. Since we are taking a lazy approach, there is a good chance that a free space ball will contain an obstacle or vice-versa. As such, we need to be able to resample the ball. Thus, my task was to create a function that resamples the ball.