Brazil Trip Day 5 Research Begins!

Well today was a busy day. It began at about 6:30 am when I woke up and ended around 8:30 pm when we all met up at Gurgels house for dinner.

The majority of the day consisted of meeting the facualty, most importantly Dr. Geovany who is an expert in controls and robotics(My undergrad ee degree is in controls) where he took me around his lab and introduced me to some of his projects. I must admit that this man is brilliant and his research is at a much higher level than most of the research I have ever seen. His research also extends in many directions. He has projects in autonomos robots, prosthetics, rocketry and hybrid control systems. Along with working on the rocketry project he asked me to choose one of the four projects he currently has no students on to work on for the next few months. Something I can continue even when I begin my work at the University of Brasilia Gamma campus in a few weeks with Lourdes on the energy conversion project I came to Brazil for.

I have a choice on a very unique intelligent prosthetic leg that the UnB is famous for, that uses myoelectronics for movement similar to the prosthetic hand I've been working on at the UW.

A cutting edge controls problem that currently has no solution, it's called a pendulum problem and the goal is to create a controls system that can take a two piece pendulum and control the motor that spins the pendulum to stop the pendulums perfectly upside down. (See photo)

A robot that can remember it's surroundings and react intelligently using what it knows about previous encounters with that enviorment.

Laslty, a pair of robots that work together to solve position and velocity of enviormental objects.

So for today my job was to read research journals and papers while getting up to date on the rocketry program so I can begin programing the microcontroller we are using. Overall I learned alot and read alot and tomorrow begins the programing work. We worked about 12 hours today but the good part was that our lunch was nice and long :)

Aside:

I'm trying to get use to the light breakfast and dinners because currently I probly look like a pig compared to how little people eat in Brazil for break fast and dinner.

There was one non-research related intersting thing today. There was once a car company called Gurgel and the owner was a distant relative of the Dr. Gurgel the guy im currently living with. Took some pics of the car. Unfortunatly, the car company does not exist anymore, they could not compete agaisnt volkswagon and the other car companies that came to Brazil.

I'll also try to get some pictures of the lab and my projects but I need to ask Dr. Geovany what I can take pics of because some of the projects may have sensitve information.