My poster presentation on the 28th was a lot of fun. I was worried beforehand, because most of the content is research that was done in Parasol before my time, and the poster was more about the ongoing challenges of DR-PRM rather than a new solution.

However, I was surprised to really enjoy presenting the research. I truly think the work happening in Parasol is amazing and fascinating, so having the opportunity to cheerlead the lab to other people was fun. Plus, I was surprised how much I’d learned and how many complex topics I understood and had the ability to explain to other people who had never heard of things like C-Space before.

Plus, everyone likes having a research paper about successes, but a poster about ongoing challenges seemed to draw in the curiosity of the problem solving computer science audience. I had some fun conversations where people were trying to work out possible solutions to the DR-PRM multi-robot bottlenecks themselves, and a lot of them came up with some of the possible solutions the lab has already been brainstorming.

Debugging DR-PRM continues. We realized that part of the problems is that when accessing and modifying variables through structs, it makes shallow local variables which are then deleted. Modifying the code to avoid these sort of local copies has been painstaking, but it’s such a wonderful feeling moving on to new and exciting errors!