2105-08-05: Autonomy Incubator Interns Prepare For Exit Presentations

Alex Hagiopol explains why it would be foolish to question SVO's superiority over GPS positioning.

This is usually the time of day when the Autonomy Incubator (AI) social media intern would seat herself before her government-issued blogging laptop and crank out yet another witty, engaging, and informative post about the goings-on here at the AI. Indeed, when you clicked on this article, you were probably expecting to see journalistic lede in this very spot, with a topic sentence and some relevant details about an event or a person of interest. "What happened today, O intern?" you're probably wondering at this very moment. "What delicious blend of lovable hijinks and high-tech wizardry have the folks at the lab served up for us this time?"

Well, dear readers, we have good news, and we have bad news. The bad news is, today did not hold much excitement vis á vis expanding the frontiers of science because over half of the lab was busy readying their exit presentations for Thursday.  The good news is, the exit presentations are going to be incredible.

You like jokes? Josh Eddy has jokes. He just makes them up on the spot like a comedy genius, because he wants to keep you entertained while he teaches you about Kalman filters.

The phrase "down-home country-style homemade GPUs" makes an appearance.

Gil Montague has a fancy PowerPoint with a myriad of illustrations and a ton of interesting knowledge. He's already done a branch presentation for the Flight Systems Safety Branch this week, so he's been prepared to knock this one out of the park since Monday afternoon.

The knowing smirk of a champion.

Jeremy Lim doesn't have his MICEHAB model in place yet, but once hardware moves it over here, he's going to shock and awe everyone with how skilled his robot arm will be at taking care of mice in space.

Jeremy walks the audience through our "Agile" approach before launching into MICEHAB.

And then there's Javier Puig Navarro and Bilal Mehdi: just when you thought their coordinated flight demos could not get any more compelling, they're capping off their summer in the AI by flying a heterogenous fleet of two quadrotors and two micro-UAVs in coordination. We saw a sneak peek of the routine today, and be assured, it's even cooler than it sounds.

Look at them go!

The team might be a little zealous about this demo.

Speaking of flying trajectories, Nick Woodward will present on his geo-containment systems research that we just talked about.  He has a plethora of drawings and flow charts to explain his software much better than we could, and he also has a fresh batch of AI keychains in the printer that he's been passing out to the team. Thanks, Nick!

Nick using some of the aforementioned drawings to illustrate geo-containment.

Of the interns, only Meghan Chandarana will not present tomorrow, because her tenure at the AI ends three weeks from now. Even though she has no obligation to participate, she has been extremely involved in coaching the others on presentation style and good PowerPoint form. We all very much appreciate the time and effort she's invested in the work of others, especially when she has such exciting work to be doing on her own project.