As many of you may or may not know, I’ve been involved with the Case Western Reserve University Footlighters for the past couple years. The Footlighters are a student-run musical theater organization dedicated to promoting musical theater at Case, CIM, CIA, and the in the overall Cleveland area (see: http://footlighters.case.edu.) We’ve put on productions such as Walt Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Chicago, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and The Pajama Game. We just finished performing The Pajama Game and had our semesterly show-selection meeting (a democratic process of the club members.) The results are in…

I’ll be directing West Side Story in the fall. We’re obviously months away from the production and don’t know much of anything yet.

But, I know this much:
1) Our performance will be in Carlton Commons in Cleveland Heights, OH.
2) Auditions will be held the weekend after summer break is over.
3) Callbacks will be a week later.
4) The show will be October 29-31, 2009. (8pm Thursday, 8pm Friday, 8pm Saturday, 11:59pm Saturday.)

Beyond that, no details have been set in stone… Some set design here-and-there has been sketched out… but I’m going to wait until later to share that .

So, after finding out that my show was voted in, we moved directly to officer elections. I was elected President of the club, and will be serving that post for the next school year. All-in-all: it was one of the most exciting days I’ve had in a long time.

What else has been going on? Well, the next month and a half is going to be non-stop work for me. I’ve got class until April 27th, and finals until May 7th. After that, I’ll be moving my stuff back home to Butler on May 9th. I’ll probably be home for about a week and will then moving to DC May 16th. I’ll fly from DC to Cleveland on May 17th to work on the Autonomous Lawnmower Competition until May 28th. We’ll drive to Dayton, compete, and hopefully win. We’ll drive back to Cleveland on May 30th or May 31st in time for me to catch a return flight to DC.

Finally, on June 1st, I’ll then start working for the summer at ENSCO, Inc. ENSCO were the fellows that gave us DEXTER for the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge. I’m not entirely sure what I’ll be doing, or who I’m working for, but I know it is supposed to be cool stuff (that may even be part of classified projects.)

Anyway, I’ll try to give an update sometime at the beginning of June to let you know how everything went with the Autonomous Lawnmower competition!

Lets start with CWRU Cutter. A team of a few students, led by Dr. Quinn from Case’s Biologically Inspired Center for Robotics Research, entered the ION Autonomous Lawn mowing competition. ION, or the Institute of Navigation, is a professional organization that allows collaboration between the experts of localization and planning. What better to test the integration of GPS and other sensors but an autonomous lawn mowing competition!

The competition, held in early June in Dayton, OH, was comprised of eleven initial teams. There were eight teams to show. After a long couple of weeks of work and a final rush at the end to get everything working (seems to be the case with robot projects), we placed third in the competition. We were also happy to have achieved the best combined technical report and presentation scores out of all teams. We learned a lot from the competition… including that we undersized our DC motors and had a deck that was about one inch too low. Our thrifty Hardware Expert, Jon Beno, hacked some metal on site and got the robot in a moving state. The team (including myself) were thrilled to place for our first year in the competition, and are looking forward to entering the competition again next year.

Our sponsor company, MTD Products, was also pretty happy with our performance and (is hopefully) going to continue supporting our team for the next year. For those of you that don’t know, MTD Products manufactures Cub Cadet, Troy Bilt, Yard Machine, and most Craftsman power equipment. Their product line varies from riding mowers to push mowers to string trimmers to log splitters to snow throwers. I’ve been working with MTD’s Testing department in order to automate the field testing of riding mowers. Eventually, the automation technology will probably move to testing of other products.

Another exciting thing with respect to TeamCASE and our long-over venture to the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge has finally come about. Discovery Science channel, after a long period of post-production of the series, will air Robocars. The six-week series will air starting on July 14th at 10pm. The first four episodes are each one hour and will follow 10 selected teams as they compete in the challenge from start to finish. The fifth episode is a two-hour summary of the first four episodes, and the sixth episode talks about the application of autonomous robotics to the up and coming near future industry.

A little birdie told me that Case will be primarily seen in Episode two, airing first on July 21st at 10pm. However, we will probably be shown in the other episodes from time to time… so keep an eye out!

My parents traveled to southern California to watch the race (had TeamCASE been in the field). Instead of preparing for the final event, we ended up doing a little sight seeing in the area. We traveled North to Sequoia National Park to see the big Sequoia trees and over East to see Hoover Dam. Obviously, I took lots of dam pictures on our dam tour and will put them online within the next week or so.

So I’m sure you’re asking… Now what? Well, I’m continuing to do research for Dr. Newman. Two projects I’m currently working on (that in combination should take less time than the Urban Challenge) are IGVC and FIRST. IGVC, or the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition, is a land based autonomous robot competition. Dr. Newman is a senior project design group adviser for Case’s IGVC team. After our return from California, he asked me to help out with part of the project that meshes very well with all of my previous work on the Urban Challenge. The other project I’m volunteering for is FIRST — a high school robotics competition. A group of undergraduate and graduate students are mentoring a local high school in robotic design and control so that they can enter the competition. I’ll talk more about the approaches they chose later (as the project unfolds.)

And now that I have more time, you’ll finally be hearing more from me!

– Until then.