It’s now been a full week of being here at my second internship and it so far has been amazing experience! On Sunday me and my dad drove down to small town just out side of Price in Utah where we met my host family and then I went with my host family all the way back to Salt Lake City.
Monday was my first day in the lab so I was shown around the lab, worked a bit on the unity project making a box stay with the player as it moves around and rotate with the players so that it stays in the players view, though we had many difficulties with trying to navigate a legacy version of Unity the game engine we were working in. The version of Unity we are using is from 2012 and because of that finding resources online was very difficult and the official documentation also didn’t go back to the version we were using. We also tried to work a bit on the networking portion where we used a different program to get the robot to transmit data to the game engine though we ran out of time in the lab before we got anything working since Mason the person who I was going to be working with during this internship the most had to go to his class. Tuesday was a day off from the lab so I went and walked around the area around where I was staying to familiarize myself with it.
On Wednesday we had a weekly zoom meeting with the other members from the lab we talked about what we have achieved in the past week and what we want to achieve in the next week. After the zoom had finished we headed over to the lab to keep working on the robot, we managed to get a signal being transmitted from the robot to the game from which we could decode it into a readable data type. Though getting communications setup was not without issue though through many trails we came to the solution of running the UDP (User Datagram Protocol) client on a separate thread that while in the thread having the listening in a loop. Or in other words we put the code that was listening for a signal being sent to it in a separate process allowing other processes to run while it was constantly listening.
On Thursday we went into the lab again where we met Nate Baum one of the PHD students working on the project, he was mainly working on the controls for the robot the whole time he was there so we didn’t get to talk all too much. Though we did some more work on the communications and got the robot transmitting all the data we need, that being three numbers for positional data(x, y, z for a Vector3), four numbers for rotational data (x, y, z, w for Quaternions), and a single number for identifying which model to use for the in game representation of what you are going to be moving.
Friday was another day off from the lab so me and Mason went out an about town were we visited a retro game store and watched a movie called Flow in the city park. Saturday was also again another day off from the lab so we ended up going on a hike up in Cottonwood canyon to a lake called Cecret Lake which was amazing to see. We also ended up having friends over for dinner one of which used to be in a robotics team who went to the world championship and it was really amazing to be able to talk to her and how her team was ran.
The computer and workstation where I have been doing a majority of my work at
A close up of the screen with some code
The robot that I have been working on, with the three displays in the background, and a treadmill on the ground
Cecret lake, the lake we hiked up to on Saturday
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