This week I completed lesson 4, which concludes the onboarding lessons. In lesson 4, I read about discussed the topology of C-Spaces. I’d never learned about topology before, so learning that a maze and a square are the same shape took some getting used to, but I found it interesting. Then, we were asked to really code in C++ and the Parasol library for the first time. We eached coded our each own EST (Expansive-Space Tree) using the Parasol Library. In an EST, trees of nodes grow from the start and end goals and then attempt to merge. Like PRMs, ESTs sample the configuration space, but like RRTs and unlike PRMs, they’re useful for finding single paths rather than repeated use.

It was a good project to get used to the standards for the lab and debugging methods we can use. I got much better at gdb. However, I still spent over ten hours trying to solve a single segmentation fault. I slept so well once I finally got it.