In late December I acted as a plenary speaker at the EVIC Robotics Summer School in Santiago Chile. The Summer School seemed good with a nice selection of talks and poster presentations. In particular I visited the lab of Javier Ruiz-del-Solar at the Universidad de Chile. They have a large team there that is going a lot of very interesting work including walking humanoid robotics, robocup systems, hardware design, robotic mining applications and algorithm development.
Santiago itself seemed prosperous and interesting, but not as exciting from a tourist point of view as some of the outlying regions of Chile, which has a diverse set of different climates and ecosystems. While there I took a quick trip to the town of San Pedro in the Atacama desert, one of the most dry places on Earth. If I find time, I might post some photos eventually.
2010
2010
Air Canada now allows frequent flyers to track their annual activity. In 2009 is seems I flew 33 segments on Air Canada. That's sickening... No wonder I don't find flying that exciting any more!
2010
We leave for our Sea Trials in just 36 hours or so. One more long day. The last week has been a wild ride and many software and hardware systems for our robots got a final checkout and some fine tuning. Of course, there was also a mad rush to include some last features or goodies after the last "drop dead" date.
Even our kooky underwater GPS until was waterproofed and attached. I added some final audio feedback elements and software flags. A possible leak was found and fixed. A bad solder joint led to a whole bunch of wiring getting replaced in a much better format. Everything seemed almost under control, until the bad smell came.
Late this afternoon a bad burning plastic small came from inside the robot. From Ramius too, the healthy young stallion, not from crusty old Aqua 1. Everything seems to work, but clearly something was wrong. Well, it looks like the CPU fan on the ADL CPU card died. We have a spare we can swap in, but it involves a major strip-down effort and, if we rush it, there is a risk we'll damage a cable or cause some other mayhem. It not clear there is time. Since the students need to meet at the lab at 3am to be sure to clear security in these crazy days, there is precious little time to lose.
I am still not sure how this is going to work out. Swap out now? Swap out after we arrive? Run slow and brave the heat? This is too frustrating for words!
Well, Philippe is swapping it out now. If all goes well, we can struggle to pack everything in time.
