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Pittsburgh wrap-up
Mar. 26th, 2004 02:15 pmOn Friday at CMU I got to meet with a bunch of faculty more-or-less at random. I had sent in a list of a few people who I thought would be interesting, but none of these profs appeared on my schedule when I arrived at CMU. That was fine, as the profs I ended up meeting were interesting enough and some of them I'd consider for an advisor. Sara Majetich, for example, seems particularly promising.
But on Monday, with no official program going on, I got to assemble my own schedule, and I had a fabulous time! At 9:30 I met with Prof. Robert B. Griffiths (not to be confused with the dept.'s Richard Griffiths, or with the department's six other Roberts), who is doing some interesting stuff with quantum mechanics, and with quantum information theory (!), and then right after that I met with cosmologist Richard Holman. Here I finally hit upon the right question to ask: ``Give me the hard sell!'' Skip with the niceities and convince me to come here!
Then I visited the CMU Robotics Club, which has a huge workspace and seems to be enormously successful with getting undergrads to build robots. I grilled them on the nature of their success, etc etc, with the idea of possibly importing such ideas to Berkeley. The people there were enormously friendly, and even took me to see CMU's "Red Team" entry to the DARPA Grand Challenge, which is now lodged haphazardly into a corner of the building!
In the midst of my grilling the Robotics Club folks on how they manage to be so successful, I got a call from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
krasnoludek who I know through Kenny but really only through livejournal before this. It was neat to meet, and he took me out to lunch at some "Thai Trucks" that deliver yummy cheap thai food to campus daily. We had a good chat about CMU and then both ran off in our various directions.
Ben Henty and Jeff Lanza of the Carnegie Tech Radio Club took Gabriel and me up to their `shack' and we talked radio stuff for a little bit. Their office is up in the rotunda above campus, and we actually climbed up on the platform there, which offered a fantastic vantage (and blasting freezing wind and snow) of the city and the campus. Ben wants to experiment with PSK31, I think that sounds pretty interesting. I thought it was exciting that a campus had a radio club, even if there are only a handful of members.
Remember that movie of a swimming robot that I posted a week or so ago? That robot is RHex, and CMU is working on it as well, although not the swimming version. A very friendly grad student by the name of Sarjoun took me on a tour of the RHex lab there, gave me a tour of the inner workings of the robot. It really is an exciting robot. Inside their are two Pentium III's on single-board computers, one for vision processing and one for everything else. There's a solid-state gyroscope that uses the momentum of photons cycling in coiled fibers to serve as an inertial reference device. The thing talks via IEEE 802.11 and is actually controlled via a "Wingman" control pad! Amazingly it's powered by what appear to be a small collection of D-cell NiCd's, on which it can run (literally) for 45 minutes. Such coolness.
Then another grad student showed me around the Field Robotics Center, where there are all sorts of rather large autonomous robots, such as one that explores old coal mines on its own recognaisance, another that searches for meteorites in Antarctica, and perhaps the coolest, a robot that consists solely of several arms sprouting from a common vertex that is designed to self-assemble trusses in a zero-gravity environment.
And after that I ran off to the airport to catch my flight home. A pretty exciting day, though, don't you agree?
But on Monday, with no official program going on, I got to assemble my own schedule, and I had a fabulous time! At 9:30 I met with Prof. Robert B. Griffiths (not to be confused with the dept.'s Richard Griffiths, or with the department's six other Roberts), who is doing some interesting stuff with quantum mechanics, and with quantum information theory (!), and then right after that I met with cosmologist Richard Holman. Here I finally hit upon the right question to ask: ``Give me the hard sell!'' Skip with the niceities and convince me to come here!
Then I visited the CMU Robotics Club, which has a huge workspace and seems to be enormously successful with getting undergrads to build robots. I grilled them on the nature of their success, etc etc, with the idea of possibly importing such ideas to Berkeley. The people there were enormously friendly, and even took me to see CMU's "Red Team" entry to the DARPA Grand Challenge, which is now lodged haphazardly into a corner of the building!
In the midst of my grilling the Robotics Club folks on how they manage to be so successful, I got a call from
krasnoludek who I know through Kenny but really only through livejournal before this. It was neat to meet, and he took me out to lunch at some "Thai Trucks" that deliver yummy cheap thai food to campus daily. We had a good chat about CMU and then both ran off in our various directions.Ben Henty and Jeff Lanza of the Carnegie Tech Radio Club took Gabriel and me up to their `shack' and we talked radio stuff for a little bit. Their office is up in the rotunda above campus, and we actually climbed up on the platform there, which offered a fantastic vantage (and blasting freezing wind and snow) of the city and the campus. Ben wants to experiment with PSK31, I think that sounds pretty interesting. I thought it was exciting that a campus had a radio club, even if there are only a handful of members.
Remember that movie of a swimming robot that I posted a week or so ago? That robot is RHex, and CMU is working on it as well, although not the swimming version. A very friendly grad student by the name of Sarjoun took me on a tour of the RHex lab there, gave me a tour of the inner workings of the robot. It really is an exciting robot. Inside their are two Pentium III's on single-board computers, one for vision processing and one for everything else. There's a solid-state gyroscope that uses the momentum of photons cycling in coiled fibers to serve as an inertial reference device. The thing talks via IEEE 802.11 and is actually controlled via a "Wingman" control pad! Amazingly it's powered by what appear to be a small collection of D-cell NiCd's, on which it can run (literally) for 45 minutes. Such coolness.
Then another grad student showed me around the Field Robotics Center, where there are all sorts of rather large autonomous robots, such as one that explores old coal mines on its own recognaisance, another that searches for meteorites in Antarctica, and perhaps the coolest, a robot that consists solely of several arms sprouting from a common vertex that is designed to self-assemble trusses in a zero-gravity environment.
And after that I ran off to the airport to catch my flight home. A pretty exciting day, though, don't you agree?
