In week 2, I finished the second lesson of the onboarding program, which involved reading about and experimenting with Probabilistic Roadmaps for motion planning, and got close to finishing lesson 3. Lesson 3 involved using Parasol’s code base to run experiments to become familiar with how changing the environments, samplers, and connectors for PRMs changes the sampling of the environment and the likelihood of finding a path between a start and goal.

Lesson three has been challenging because I am unfamiliar with C++ and the Parasol Planning Library, and so I am unsure how to debug when something goes wrong. Some of the samplers in the code we were trying to run didn’t work and I had to have experienced PhD students help me modify the code. However, it has been exciting to code in C++ for the first time (so far it feels like Java that’s more annoying to debug) and I feel like I’ve learned a lot about C-Space, PRMs, and the various components needed to do motion planning in Parasol. Plus, I successfully used Vizmo this week to vizualize the graphs I created running experiements in my xml file. It’s exciting to see evidence that the concepts I’ve been reading about in papers actually work.