As I mentioned in my last post, I would be attending the 2009 Autonomous Lawnmower Competition hosted by the Institute of Navigation. Myself, along with a team of fellow Case Western Reserve University students, represented the university at the competition in May, 2009. After some frustrating hardware failures and last-minute MacGuyver fixes, we pulled through and came out on top. We placed 1st out of six teams in the dynamic mowing competition. Photos from the competition should make their way onto the site. Oh wait, the gallery is broken. Scratch that. One of these days, a new gallery should come online… and then new photos can be added. As you know, it might be another two to three months before I get that online, so don’t hold your breath. But know that it is on the list of things to do in my spare time.

This past summer, I worked at ENSCO, Inc., in Springfield, VA. I had an absolutely fantastic experience at ENSCO. My experience was so great, that I hope to go back and intern again next summer (between my Senior year and the beginning of my graduate studies.) In the mean time, I’m maintaining a few hours here-and-there with ENSCO continuing work on the project(s) I completed during my brief internship.

Ah, you see the “beginning of my graduate studies” there… Yes, that’s right; I’ll be staying at Case as part of the BS/MS combine Bachelors/Masters program in Electrical Engineering. That’s just fancy wording that should, if all goes as planned, allow me to graduate with my B.S. in 4 years (as planned.) And — with another year, my M.S. in Electrical Engineering. To kick off my masters studies, I’m enrolled in two graduate level courses this fall: EECS490 (computer vision) and EECS491 (artificial intelligence.) Other than these two graduate classes, I’m taking a relatively (only 15 credit) light workload this semester. However, I’ve got things to keep me busy…

… which is where the exciting part of this semester comes in. As I mentioned in the last post, I’m directing West Side Story for The Case Footlighters this fall. Audition information has been posted on the website (http://footlighters.case.edu.) Essentially, open auditions start on the Sunday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of the first week of classes. Callbacks are the following Saturday. First read through is the following Sunday. And, in about two months and one week later: performances.

I’m hoping that I’ll have time to blog about being director. If I don’t have time to do the updates, I’ll try to at least keep some semblance of a record of the notable parts of the experience so that I can write later.

Well, that’s all for now!

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!