This week I finished the onboarding. This included coding an EST tree (Expansive-Space Tree), which finds a path between two points by growing trees from both points and by attempting to connect the ends of both trees until a path is successfully found. I had some trouble debugging, and since my bug was a complex inheritance issue within the Parasol Motion Planning Library, Isaac Ngui (a friendly PhD student) helped me solve the bug. I learned a lot about GDB by watching him debug.

Then, I worked on improving the onboarding lessons for future people who will join the lab. I helped modify grammer and expand quiz questions to be more specific.

Additionally, I read a paper that Irving Solis and others from Parasol Lab worked on. Their technique for Conflict-Based Search (CBS) is highly effectively compared to existing solutions at multi-robot motion planning. It efficiently resolves possible collisions between multiple robots travelling in the same space. However, I still have some questions. CBS represents the robots paths as a graph, with edges as possible paths, but how does it guarantee that all the edges are sufficiently space so that robots don’t get too close to one another?

Finally, I am prepare to start the open sourcing project next week. Parasol’s code bases, PMPL, is prepare to eventually go open-source, so I’ll be working on cleaning up some old code. I’ll be working on the Bridge Test. My PhD mentor Courtney sent me a paper on how the test works.