During Week 1 (ending June 4th), I moved into my apartment, got my student ID at Illinois, and was issued my Illinois ID. I visited the Parasol Lab in the Siebel Computer science building at UIUC where I’ll be working this summer. There are friendly PhD and grad students working on motion and task planning in the lab. I met those that are currently in person and learned a bit about their individual research projects.

We will be working on onboarding lessons on Canvas to learn the basics of motion plannin before starting specific research projects. There are five of us going through onboarding together. Most people are about to start graduate or PhD work here which is both very cool and a bit intimidating. This week, the lessons included getting access to the lab’s code repository and beginning to learn about Configuration Spaces (which described valid positions of robots). Through a mistunderstanding, I also began reading a paper on PRMs (Probabilistic Roadmap Method), but won’t finish it until a later lesson.

I also attended the first of the Wednesday free weekly lunch and lectures for computer science undergraduates doing research here this summer. I had a nice conversation with a faculty member there.