Tech Update

It's been a busy week here. Yesterday we packed up early in the morning and took a ferry from Valletta, Malta to Pachino, Sicily. From there we hopped a few buses and took a beautiful ride through the country, passing by the world's most active volcano (Mount Etna) along the way. We reached our hotel in Carini (in the province of Palermo, Sicily) in the afternoon and got situated for deployment. Billy will talk about that, so I will cover the other things that have been going on. Despite the nagging fatigue that we are all feeling, there have been some really great project improvements. Since these will also be addressed in similar blog posts, I will give a little update on mine: the archaeologist graphical interface.

I have already put together a majority of the framework for the interface, and recently began loading in cistern meshes. Due to the fact that Billy and Jeff have their code complete (aside from per-cistern fine tuning), the three of us can pump out a cistern model and have it online in about an hour. We will be doing this for each new cistern that we deploy the robot into. My project is still running into some choppiness which will be sorted out in 2-3 days.

Here is a sample of my progress as of today.

Note: If you are running Linux, you may run into difficulty with the Unity3D plugin.

I am still working on the textures/lighting of the cistern and water, the spherical linear interpolation of the rotational trackball (should be a quick fix!), and the photo selection on the right hand side of the interface. It may not be very easy to see, but right now all that the photo selection does is highlight a region on the wall that the selected picture shows. Once the photo selection is complete the model will rotate so that the highlighted area that the picture displays will be more visible and a frustrum with the robot's position and angle of view will be shown. I also intend to use Tim's higher quality go-pro pictures, rather than these stills from the video stream from last year. I might end up adding a big pop-up version of the photo as well. We'll see what happens. Aside from that, it's time to start rapidly uploading and spitting out cisterns as we deploy into them!

Meetings and Technical Update

It truly has been a busy week. As that all us Cal Poly students leave tomorrow, much preparation was done this week. Many of us had to take one or more final exams, and finish final projects for our classes. Thursday night the team went out to dinner to take a small break from preparations and plan the packing of our technical equipment. On Friday we packed everything we needed from the Lair and confirmed some last minute details.

For a little more than the last week I have been helping Sara with the water and society part of ICEX. I worked to install the Omeka database system on the server space provided by the Cal Poly Computer Science Department. Due to my lack of experience in database installation it took longer than expected but on Friday it was successfully installed. The website for the database is not currently in a state that we would like to share with the public but I expect that it won't be very long until it is. Unfortunately, due to the time it took me to set up the database among the other work for this past week, I have not had the chance to work on the programming side of my project but Tyler and Tim have gotten some work done on the mounting of the Otter Box cases.These will house the salinity sensor, the pressure/temperature sensor and the PAM. See the post below for more details.

Robots at Pacheco!

This last Wednesday we had the opportunity to visit the kids at Pacheco elementary once again. We came armed with a bucket of neat solar robot kits that teams of students would get the opportunity to play with. Kids could chose from a number of models, such as a race car, windmill, airboat, or walking dog.

We started out by reviewing the basics from last week and then went over the different sources of power for an electric motor. We gave a quick explanation of how electric motors work, then set the kids loose to build their robots.

My group built the airboat and had a ton of fun using the lamps we brought to drive it around the sink. A few other groups built the walking dog, race car, and boat as well. The kids were having a blast watching their robots cruise around the room!

After everyone had successfully built a working model, we had the kids tear everything down and then build a race car for each group. Once everyone had finished, we took all of the cars outside in the sun and raced them down the sidewalk. The kids absolutely loved this part, and I had a pretty good time myself. It was really funny to watch them all running down the road screaming at their cars to go faster.

Afterwards, we packed everything up and headed out, another successful lesson completed! This coming week we'll be doing the same lesson with a different group of kids. Looking forward to it!

Archaeologist Graphic Interface Update

After a meeting this week, we've decided on the applications that will be used for the 3D graphic interface project. Because Google Earth already has a geo-spacially oriented, properly scaled, navigable world built out of satellite images, we decided that it would be best to create a Google Earth layer with links to SONAR mosaics and 3D meshes for each site. This allows us to build the framework for our interface before the trip, and then fill the information from each site right after it is visited.

We plan to embed our Google Earth layer right into Sara's water and society website, and host all of our other files (3D cistern meshes, SONAR overlays, etc.) there as well. The embedded Google Earth layer will have pop up descriptions, pictures, and links to other information collected from each cistern. I will still be using an embedded Unity3D frame to display the 3D cistern meshes (slightly simpler than writing code in WebGL that would allow the 3D mesh file to be navigable by a camera, although it does require a browser plug-in unlike WebGL). This frame will also be hosted on the Omeka water and society website. I should have a samples up shortly! Stay tuned!

IRB Forms, Omeka and Water and Society Project

The Water and Society Project, I am working on is mainly targeted at educators and classrooms that are interested in learning more about water and its impact on Malta and its culture. Envisioned for this project is to be able to set up curriculums and lesson plans based around gathering information from sources and references that ICEX has collect throughout its research on Malta.

This past week and a half, I have been working with Jane to fill out and submit IRB forms for my part of the project. For my project, specifically, we needed to gather information about the cisterns and interview people who came into contact with them. However, to be able to interview individuals and use the information we receive from them we needed to submit three forms to the Human Research Committee, who would determine whether the research we are doing will not harm any of the individuals we come into contact with and that the research is acceptable. We spent quite a bit of time, writing, revising and changing the forms to describe all aspects of the project. I submitted the forms this morning, so we are hoping the Committee will review our documents and approve our project soon, before we leave we hope!

Jane, Erik, Brent, and I also decided that Omeka was going to be our UI & database. It will hold all of the sources and information we collect. Zoe introduced Jane, Erik and I to Alan in the Computer Science Department and we discussed with him the possibility of us using Cal Poly server space to hold the Omeka information. We decided that was probably the best for this project, however, Alan said that usually projects that use the Cal Poly server space are not permanent and thus get little bits of space. We don't think that the project will use a lot of space, so we think this will be alright for the time being at least. Once we get to the point where we need more space or want to change the duration of the project, etc. we will decide the next step then.

Lastly! The four of us also had a skype session with John Lester about unity 3D and Jibe products and their abilities and limitations. I think we will use this for Erik's project, specifically for the archeologist side, however, Jane and I have bounced around the idea of using it in collaboration with Omeka for the Water and Society Project as well. We haven't figured out all the details yet, but from my knowledge it would be really cool to use.

The program is a virtual world program, which enables a person to create a character and walk around and interact with a world that we (the ICEX members) can build. Characters can come into contact with each other, have meetings, presentations, look at specific locations, and do a bunch of other things that can make it more user friendly to get information about Malta and its cisterns.

The part that Jane and I were most interested in for the Water and Society Project, was the ability to hold tours or classroom 'field trips' to the various locations in Malta with the information that we will collect once over there. I think this would be a great tool for educators to be able to use and I would love to try and work with it for the project, but due to the cost and some other factors, we haven't decided yet whether we will officially try to use it yet or not.

That's the most of it so far! I will be working more with Omeka and looking at unity 3D and Jibe in more detail in the near future and we will be waiting anxiously from the Human Research Committee to see if our study has been approved and we can move forward!

Pacheco Elementary Labs and 3D Visualization Update

Hi everyone,

Today was our second of 6 robotics demos for the kids at Pacheco, and things went great! We have done lab #1 both weeks for different classes so far, and the kids love it. The lesson goes something like this:

We show up, the kids come in from recess, and Mrs. Banfield introduces us to them and tells them that we are there to talk about robotics, at which point every kid in the class gasps "OHHHHHHH ROBOTS!!!".

From there I start off with a powerpoint that shows Wall-E bumbling around on the screen collecting balls, and we split up into groups to talk with students about what the know and what they would like to learn about robots. I walk back to the front to ask them questions about better known robots like Roombas, and then Billy gets up to talk about one of the robots that was sitting around in the LAIR. After Billy talks about the brains, arms, and eyes of that robot, we split up into groups again to let the kids design a robot of their own on paper.

After that the fun begins. Tyler and Sara have a competition to see who can build a Lego robot the fastest, and then we ask the kids what they think these robots do. We tell them that the robots brains were programmed to follow lines, so when you lay white masking tape on the black carpet, the robots know how to stay on track. We then demonstrate by allowing each kid to lay down a piece of tape so that a track is made. We put the lego robots on the track and the kids watch as the robots follow the lines (and sometimes collide with each other). After that, we get back into groups to talk about what they learned today, and then I head back up to the front to introduce the solar robots that we will be playing with next time we meet them.

The kids are so enthusiastic about the lesson, and Mrs. Banfield is right there with them. Hopefully we can keep up the great work at Pacheco elementary in the next 4 weeks!




On the 3D visualization front: Jane, Sara, Brent, and I skyped with John "Pathfinder" Lester, who works at ReactionGrid developing 3D environments with which people can model things. He told us about some software (Unity3D and Jibe) with which we can carry out our project for our archaeologist friends. Unity3D is a video game development software that seems to be just what we need. I plan on getting some bigger projects up and running so that in the end, we can have a map of malta with specific sites that can be zoomed into. On clicking a site, a 3D textured version of it will pop up (hopefully with a 3D model of the cistern in it) that will have triggers that bring up descriptions of the area. More from me later!