Robots Racing Robots

As a soon-to-be newly minted graduate of Brigham Young University, my final course in the Computer Engineering curriculum has been the infamous Senior Project. Each semester, the department offers several projects which are designed to represent a range of specialties in the electrical and computer engineering space. External sponsors typically fund the projects and students go from the concept generation through design and construction to prototyping the actual product. In the past, projects have included robotic soccer players, solar powered gizmos and a mini MRI device.

The project I had heard much about and was looking forward to participating in was the robot soccer project. Alas, the project was cancelled for this year to be replaced by the Robot Racers competition, so I signed up for that one instead. The basic premise of the project was to design a robot on the chassis of an R/C car capable of navigating a course autonomously. When the teams were decided, our group was basically the people that weren't picked for any other group. We didn't have much expertise in the areas of control or vision, but we all learned quickly and managed to have a working system in place by the competition yesterday.

As it turns out, our system worked better than any of the other groups. We were the only team which managed to complete the course with some degree of regularity in the time trials and won each of the heats in the head-to-head competition. Part of this was due to the excellent vision work done by Rick and to the great control algorithms designed by Alex. Mike developed the desicion making code, while I kept everyone on task and also wrote the PC based gui which allowed us to quickly change operating parameters between runs.

All-in-all, it was a good experience, and a nice culmination to my time here at BYU. Hopefully, my time as a grad student at the University of Texas will be equally rewarding.

174 days and counting...

We told our families on Christmas, and we've started getting around to telling friends and acquaintances: Heather I are expecting. The new addition to our family should come sometime around August 1st. It's too early to tell what the gender of the baby is, but we're excited either way. It is quite sobering to think of our pending responsibilities in caring for someone who can't yet do anything on his own.

In the interim, we've decided to call the baby "Peanut." It isn't a name that we could use permanently, so we aren't afraid of it sticking, but at the same time, it's fun to refer to our new child by some kind of personal name, instead of just "it. The next few months are going to be pretty long, as we wait with anticipation for Peanut to come.

Hiking in Spring Hollow

Martin Luther King Day offered and excellent chance to enjoy some of the great outdoors. What made things even better was the fact that it had just snowed quite a bit in the mountains the weekend before. I woke up and left Heather to enjoy breakfast with her sisters-in-law as I rode with Erik, Bruce and Berkley up to Spring Hollow on the South Fork of the Provo River.

We arrived at the trailhead and put all of our gear on. There was only one other car there, which was probably due to the rather cold temperatures, somewhere in the mid-teens. We finally started up the drainage around 8am.

The temperature remained cold, but we had a blast! We got the see the run rise on back of Cascade Mountain and then as the shadows gradually fled from the narrow valley we were hiking through. We followed snowmobile tracks for a while, and then the tracks of a lone snowboarder. Finally, we broke just a little trail of our own and stopped and simply enjoyed the beautiful scenery on a cold morning in the mountains. We had hiked around 4 miles and gained over 2,000 feet of elevation.

When we finally started to get cold again, we turned around and hiked out. We saw several groups of people closer to the trailhead, and we were grateful that we got our early to enjoy the solidarity and quietness of the mountains. We made it down to the trailhead, stowed our gear and took off. As we drove out of the canyon, we saw storms brewing on Cascade, and we were glad that we had turned around when we did. All-in-all, a great way to get out for a few hours on a wonderful winter day.

Carlsbad Caverns

After visiting Timpanogos Cave National Monument in October, Heather and I decided to head down to Carlsbad Caverns National Park on our way to Texas for the holidays. The weather turned out to be wonderful, and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.

After a long drive from Provo to Carlsbad, we got up early to be at the cave when it opened the next day. The drive to the visitor's center was quite pretty as we made our way through a canyon to a bluff in the Chihuahuan desert. We opted to walk in the natural entrance, which is a daunting mile-and-a-half walk through down a paved path. One wonders how the original explorers, mainly Jim White, managed the decent over a century ago.

Once down in the cave, we rested for a bit at the underground rest area, and then departed on a ranger-led tour of the Kings Room. In addition to the Kings Room, we took the self-guided tour around the Big Room (ground area of over 14 football fields!) and saw many other formations and features. When we'd had our fill of the caves, we took the elevator the 750 feet back up to the surface and began the long drive to our destination in Dallas.

Let it Snow!

A cold front moved through during the weekend, and it brought some storms. It was raining all day in the valley yesterday, but when the clouds had lifted, we had snow on the mountains down to 6,200 feet. Pretty crazy, considering it has only been since late May since we've seen snow that low. This has indeed been a weird year, weather-wise. It cleared up overnight, this morning was chilly, and it will probably all melt before the day is out, but it's nice to see what's just around the corner.

In other news, Heather and I are still planning on going camping this weekend up American Fork Canyon. We've got tickets for Timpanogos Cave on Saturday and figured we may as well use the new camping gear we got for our wedding. It'll be cold, but fun.