For nearly three weeks there has been a forest fire, dubbed the “Station Fire”, that has raged in the hills above Pasadena. This summer I have been working at Jet Propulsion Laboratories, working in the Computer Vision Laboratory. This fire was really close to the lab. Some of the surrounding area was evacuated and they even closed down the lab at one point. The fire early on Sunday came to within a few hundred yards of JPL.
I found this cool time lapsed video, taken by Dan Finnerty, of the fire in the hills above Pasadena. The cluster of buildings in the foreground is JPL. The place that I worked is building 198 which is semi-visible in the video, but not really.
I few months ago I purchased a new bike from Amazon.com for $236. It was very cool looking but was stolen in only 6 day! by some bike thieves who cut my bike lock. The ironic part was that I predicted that might happen so I purchased as super-heavy-duty lock and I was walking outside to put it on when I discovered my cut, old lock and my missing bike.
I reluctantly bought a second bike to replace the first. This one I vowed to keep secure. As a precaution I decided to paint this one ugly so as to deter thieves. It is now black with orange stripes. Some people tell me that it looks like a tiger.
Before: Blue with chrome. Very fancy looking.
After: Flat back with Orange Stripes. Atrociously ugly
I documented this project very well and wrote it up as a instructable. You can view it below of follow this link to instructable project page.
On ditch day I signed up for the stack “The Wire”. It was pretty fun. The stack was created by the Lloyd seniors, Max Grazier G’Sell, Matt Czubakowski, Josh Weiner and Kyle Littler.
The Wire
I won’t go into every detail regarding the stack, but I will show some of the highlights. I joined Barksdale’s Crew and my teammates were Kenzie, Flora, Elisa and Ishwari. Here is a photo of the whole crew. I succeeded in blinking.
Ishwari, Myself, Elisa, Kenzie and Flora
Snappy group we were. Working together with teamwork. We solved puzzles and riddles via the fine delicate art of hitting them with a sledge hammer.
Flora, Elisa (glaring menacingly), Isha and Kenzie
For one puzzle we had to find the next clue inside of a hard drive. We were given a 15lb “data extraction tool”. It was tough work but with careful application we extracted the data in little bits and retrieved the note.
Kenzie having a bit too much fun smashing a hard drive
We all got a turn to smash the hard drive. Good fun.
Elisa giving a wack
Another clue in the stack was the serial numbers on some “stolen” weapons. We had some good fun playing with the mp5’s.
He is in the elevator. Get him!
Another clue for the stack was tied to a dead body that was sunk to the bottom of the pool with concrete blocks. I admire the seniors attention to detail and realism with their use of a real dead body. Quite a find. It took some work but we found the clue.
Nearly simultaneous jumping
All this ‘dead body searching’ and pool swimming had made us hungry so we decided to take a ice cream break at the C-store.
Ice cream break!
During our break, Flora got some valuable intel from Max via her handy cell phone.
Multitasking; Ice cream AND cell phone!
Insert GIANT photo scavenger hunt here. You can see pictures of it in the phone gallery. The last clue brought us to a large steel and concrete, door breaching tool. This 25lb behemoth enabled us, as a team, to make short work of the senior’s door. Unfortunately (or maybe luckily) we did not have any flash bang grenades.
Look! It is a hole in your door. How did that get there?
I swear the door was like that when I got here
Our reward was a case of sparking apple cider. Good fun all around. Here is a picture of the other team from our stack.
Kyle, Nick and Rishi
Toast to a great ditch day.
Toast
After everything was over our team signed the door fragment. Our team was apparently called “Team ‘Girls and Russell’”
Ditch day is today, May 27th. Woot! We gotten woken up at 7:30am by the seniors. They made pretty awesome posters. Here is the Lloyd’s ditch day stacks.
The Wire
Pokemon the stack
XKCD the stack
Robin Hood the stack
Sandman the stack
Battlestar Galactica the stack
These very cool pictures of the posters are brought to you by Chris Dewan. Here is a pictures that I took of sleepy Lloydies lining up come 8:00 am. Everybody is in their pajamas.
Sleepy Lloydies
More Lloydies
Here is a picture I took of the seniors watching us from the safety of the roof. On ditch day it is legal, upon seeing a senior, to duck tape them to a tree. This rule is rarely enforced from what I can tell.
Seniors "Supervising"
ABC did a new story on Caltech’s Ditch Day. Unfortunately it did not contain any Lloydies. It also makes the whole school look like a bunch of nerds. But you can watch it if you want, as it is funny.
According to irrefutable sources Ditch Day is tomorrow. In preparation I have assembled my ditch day satchel bag that contains all the essential needed for a day of fun.
Ditch Day Satchel Bag
Here is what I have in my bag:
1 liter of water (for hydration)
Rock Star Energy Drink (for waking up at 7am)
Protein Bar (for nourishment)
Slim Jim (for a snack)
Camera (for documentation)
Duct Tap (for utility)
Flash Light (needed for the tunnels)
Lock Picks (to help with any pesky locks)
Knife (for utility)
Backup Knife (for extra utility)
Calculator (for calculating things)
Sharpies (for writing things on things)
Pen and Pencil (for taking notes)
Moleskin notebook (for recording notes)
Jumbo Paper Clip (always useful)
Bobby Pin (most underrated small object)
Cell Phone (for communications)
Passport (in case I need to go out of the country)
$500 Cash (in case I need it for bribes)
I fit all of this into my small satchel bag that I bought from Amazon for $10. It was sort of a tight fit but it will only get lighter as the day progresses. Woot!! Ditch Day is tomorrow.
Today was the transmission mini-contest for my engineering design class ME 71. We had to design a transmission that has the best performance in terms of acceleration and top speed. Our team name was called “Max Power” and was composed of Christine, Stacy and myself.
"Max Power" transmission
We had been designing/building this for about 2 weeks. Here is the SolidWorks model that I build for the project. From this I made the drawing that I used to machine the six Plexiglas plates that we needed.
Soildworks model of our transmission
We finished all the machining and started the testing the day before the contest. We did lots of testing but did not change anything about our design. The main thing that we found was the setup had little effect on the performance. It was very consistent regards if we set it up in-alignment, out-of-alignment or skewed in the jig. I guess this is a good thing.
"Max Power" in the test jig
There is a special testing jig that has the motor and the flywheel setup along with computer to record the velocity profile. Our contest run was actually the best of any of our runs we did in testing. That was pretty cool.
Velocity graph for our transmission
The score for each team is computed by the formula:
Score = (Max Speed) / (Time to reach 250 RPM)
We had the value of V_max = 410.31 RPM and T_250 = 18.69 secs this gave us a score of 21.95 This placed us in 6th place. You can see the score of everybody below.
Scores Board
The best transmission was a very innovative design by Team “Capt’n Crunch”. Their idea was to build a planetary gear transmission. This was very risky. I would have discounted the idea but they made it work.
Team "Capt'n Crunch"s planetary gear transmission
The main problem with building this kind of gear box is that you don’t have any metal to work with and have to just build Plexiglas disks as gears. This would worry me a lot but team “Capt’n Crunch” build the transmission with slip fit construction (0.00 free space) and it worked just fine. In fact it worked so well that it got a score of 41.38! Nearly double my team’s score.
Team "Capt'n Crunch"s Planetary gear in the testing jig
Looking back at our analysis and the performance of the other teams we saw that we build our gear ratio too low. We assumed about a 50% efficiency and this number gives an optimal scoring gear ratio of 7:1. Based on our performance it looks like we actually had a much higher efficiency then 50% and it may have be closer to 80-90%. This means that we should have use a gear ratio that was closer to 6:1. Among the gearboxes that had 7:1 ratio we performed very well. Well, better luck next time.
I take solace in the fact the our transmission was ROCK solid strong. It had two plates top and bottom and four vertical parallel plates of 1/2″ Plexiglas and a total of 24 bolts holding it together! There was no shims in our construction and everything was perfectly aligned on the first try. Our transmission was definitely the most robust of them all. My proof is that I have pictures of three people standing on our transmission without it breaking! A feat that no other team can claim.
Myself standing on our transmission
My teammate, Christine, standing on the transmission
And best of all my professor standing on the transmission.
My professor, Matt Heverly, standing on our transmission
The contest was good fun all around. Now that it is over, time get started on the final project! So little time.
If you want to see all the picture from the contest you can view my photo gallery here.
This last weekend was Jet Propulsion Lab’s Open House. It was quite fun and I got to take many pictures of cool robots.
Axel, Cliff Climbing Robot
This is a picture of Axel which is a robot destined for the moon or mars and can climb and descend cliffs. This was was cool because my friend will be working on a SURF (Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship) with this robot and she was driving it that day for the guests of JPL.
Model Mars Exploration Rover (MER)
There was a model of the current Mars Exploration Rover (MER) . It had functional motors and was driving about in the arena.
Mars Science Laboratory (MSL)
There was a model of Mars Science Laboratory (MSL). This is a huge rover with tons more sensors then the previous rovers. If all goes right this is destined for mars in 2011. A cool fact is that this rover will be nuclear powered (Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators or RTG) and will generate over four times the energy of the MERs without needing any sunlight.
MSL Suspension Prototype
Here was another picture of what I believe is a prototype mock-up of the suspension for the MSL. This is contrasted with the above picture which I believe to be more of a display prototype as opposed to being a functional prototype.
My favorite robot of the day was ATHLETE which stands for All-Terrain Hex-Legged Extra-Terrestrial Explorer. This thing was HUGE and was only a 1/3 scale prototype. It was in the current configuration 6′ tall and could stand up to probably 10′. This robot will be the heavy lifter /helper robot for the astronauts when we return to the moon in 2020. The goal will be for it to be able to lift 20 tons of cargo and carry it around the moon. It was an amazing spectacle. Each “leg” has 6-DOF and a wheel. This lets it roll around and also use the wheels, as feet, to walk. It will be able to scale obstacles in excess of 20′! An interesting fact is that my two ME 71 professors, Matt Heverly and Curtis Collins, are apparently working on this project.
Robot driving over little kids!
As a fun thing for the kids there was a booth were they would drive a 8-wheeled rover over you as you laid down. It was quite funny to watch.
FLIR Systems Camera Setup
In another place they had set up a FLIR Systems camera where you could see yourself in predator “thermal vision”. Very cool. This model camera (p640) was sensitive to light between 7.5 – 13 µm with a peak at 10 µm. I’m the one in the middle that looks like he is holding a camera.
Most Expensive Ice Cream Ever!
As the last order of business I bought “Astronaut” ice cream. It is freeze dried. This has the record of the most expensive ice cream that I have ever purchased, coming in at $150 per pound of ice cream (thank god that I only bought 0.7 oz).
If you want you may see my full photo gallery at this link.
Posted: May 2nd, 2009 | Author:russrobot | Filed under:Caltech | Comments Off
Team Picture: Stacy, Me and Christine
May 28th, was the 4th Annual ME 71 (Introduction to Engineering Design) Mini-Contest. The contest is to build a “Land Yacht” from limited materials that can travel the farthest along the floor of the ME Machine Shop. There are several scoring zones with the highest one being between 9-10m. There was 11 teams of 3 that had to design and build, and test these crafts. The team I was on was composed of Christine, Stacy and myself. Our team name was “I’m on a boat”. I found this team name much funnier then my teammates and I bought matching captain hats for the three of use. Needless to say we were the only team that had themed outfits.
Our Team Project
In the above picture you can see our craft. It was simpler the some of the other teams and was better constructed. The fan used to propel the craft is very weak and it was critical that there be very little friction if we wished it to still move at 10m out. Our yacht had perfectly cut wheels with very low friction bearings (made from paper clips). In addition it had an aerodynamic front sail. Our secret weapon was our anchor. To score the maximum points you needed to go out 10m but not any farther. We built a tether made from our string that was very nearly 10m. With lots of testing (lots and lots of testing) we got it so that it could consistently stop just fractions of inches from 10m. In the contest we stopped at 9.972 m giving us a top score of 24.94/25! Our second run we stopped at 9.912 m giving us the first best and second best score. (It was close the third best score was only off by 4mm)
Final scores for all teams
You can also see the footage our land yacht winning.
This last Saturday at the Robotics Society of Southern California we held our Robot Line Following Competition. We had a total of five contestants. It was enjoyable to watch and the contest was taken by a five year old girl!! Puts the rest of us engineers to shame. We have to come back better next month.
The field was very simple. It was constructed from white particle boards taped together with white duct tape. Then there was a 3/4″ electrical tape course created on this surface. You can see the construction below.
Course Construction
There was five bots that signed up to compete:
Scribbler created by Paul Allen
Move it created by Bob Huss
GraveDigger created by John Davis
Eve and QTpi both created by Katy Mason
"Eve" robot running created by Katy Mason
The first robot up was Scribbler which failed to run because of a software problem. The next robot to run was “Move it” which also failed to run due to battery issues and a problem with its wheels. First robot to actually move was called “Eve” and was a small yellow robot. It was very methodical and impressed the audience with its slow but constant pace.
"GraveDigger" created by John Davis
GraveDigger was up next. This is the same robot that competed in the RSSC Sumo Contest back in February. This robot was going good but about halfway through the course it got tripped up by the reflective white duct tape and loss the path and could not recover. For the second run John ran the robot backwards through the course and it worked just fine.
"QTpi" the winning robot
“QTpi” was the next robot. It was very quick and as an interesting note it is completely analog, no microcontroller, with only visual light sensors as opposed to IR. The ground clearance was very shallow and at one point got caught up on the a fold in the electrical tape.
After the first round of the competition there was a change to the course to make it harder. The course was changed to include an intersection as opposed to a simple curve. Luckily this did not trip up any of the robots.
QTpi won in the end with a finishing time of 1:18 which is a 26 sec lead over the next competitor. You can see footage of OTpi winning below.
Katy Mason posing with her two winning robots "Eve" and "QTpi"
Katy Mason earned 1st place and third place for her robots “Eve” and “QTpi”. Second place was won by Gravedigger. There was prizes for the winners! The prizes for the the winners were two Phototransistor-LED pairs, a quad half H-bridge chip and a Sharp IR sensor.
It was a very good contest over all. The Robotics Society of Southern California is hosting a second line following contest next month in May, titled “Super Line Following Contest”. It will be much larger scale, about 30m long! There will be many more participants in this contest.
You can see the all the pictures taken here at the photo gallery.
The Caltech Robotics Outreach Group is mentoring a FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) robotics team called Ramona Rampage. It is an all-girls, high school located in Alhambra, CA. We recently went to the San Diego Regional and won 11th out of 42. The team was the only all-girls team to compete.
The channel 9 News KTLA did a spot on the team that was very awesome. This clip was aired on March 27 at 8:32pm.
