Summer Research Job

I spent the entire summer of 2007 working in the lab of Dr. Atkins, a professor in the University of Michigan’s Aerospace Engineering Department, on a project that involved programming a Mars rover to navigate the grassy wave field behind the FXB building. I began the project by teaching myself to program in C and MATLAB. Subsequently, I took extensive measurements of the field and spent most of the summer writing and debugging MATLAB programs, using the data to model the wave field. After comparing the errors of different models, I settled on the best representation and used it to formulate a path planning algorithm. The calculated path and my three-dimensional field model were then loaded into the robot’s memory; in addition, as the rover traversed its path, it accumulated more specific information from its sensors. I am currently writing up my results for submission to the Intel Science Competition.

Pictures