International Project Hasselt

Getting ready The day began the same as the others: waking up at 7, getting ourselves ready, and then having breakfast around 7:45 a.m. We walked to PXL to arrive on time, which was 9 a.m. Most teams split into two groups, with one working on the robot concept and the other working on the coding project. By now, most groups were able to drive the first racetrack, called Sternforemost, pretty well. We had lunch at the same time as on other days, after which we went back to working on both the ideation and technological tracks. A New Challenge: The Rommel Track Once a few groups had made their robots autonomous enough, we were introduced to the next challenge: the Rommel Track. Interestingly, the name of the second track wasn’t fully English, and the word “Rommel” translates to rubbish or junk. This meant that there would be random obstacles such as cardboard boxes and code blocks obscuring the road. At five in the afternoon, the class was finished, and we returned to the youth hostel. A...

We got up at 7:30 a.m. and ate breakfast at the youth hostel. Then we departed on our daily hike to the school building. Our First Pitch In the morning, we had to pitch the concept ideas we had brainstormed over the previous days. This pitch had to be done using story-driven design, meaning it had to be a kind of story depicting a user who uses our conceptual robot. Everyone received feedback on how they could improve their pitch, such as making better use of story-driven development and making the presentation more engaging. Making Our Robot Autonomous After everyone had presented, we had an input session about more advanced computer vision techniques using OpenCV and how to use LiDAR. Until now, we had learned to steer the robot manually, but now it was time to make it more autonomous using computer vision and LiDAR. Computer vision is the ability to “interpret” a video signal, and LiDAR is a device that takes distance measurements around the robot. To accomplish computer vision, we ...

Getting ready An alarm was set for 7 a.m., and everyone had to wake up and initiate their morning routines. Surprisingly, this didn’t cause too much clashing. We had our breakfast in the hostel. Once we finished eating, we packed our backpacks and walked to PXL. Our First Experience with ROS We had our first programming lesson centered around robotic operating systems, or ROS for short. ROS is a framework used to control robots. We were also introduced to Gazebo, a virtual simulation environment in which we could test our code without the risk of crashing an actual robot. Once we got set up, we could experiment with controlling a TurtleBot (a small robot) using ROS in our virtual simulation, using the keyboards of our laptops as input. We learned that ROS is a system of nodes that work on a pub/sub system. There are nodes that publish data and one or more nodes that subscribe to receive the data, hence the name pub/sub system. First, we published the move we wanted the robot to make ba...

Our first morning in Hasselt After what seemed to be a rough night of sleep for all of us, we readied ourselves and headed to the cafeteria for our first breakfast in this hostel. It wasn’t anything spectacular, but it sufficed. After breakfast, we headed back to our room to grab our bags and went to the lobby. There we got picked up by two PXL students who guided us to the campus. Introduction of the project Our first lecture at PXL was about robots and how it's used in the real world. We also learned about its evolution throughout time. Afterwards, they explained what we would be doing during our project week and divided us into groups with students from the other attending academies. Our projects existed of two tracks. An ideation part and a technical part. In the ideation part, they wanted us to come up with a business idea for a robot. The technical track on the other hand, was aimed at learning the basics of computer vision using Python and the ROS framework. The rest of the ...

Our Arrival in Hasselt Our project began on a Sunday evening. Most of us arrived by train. We received the keys to our rooms and unpacked our bags. At 8 p.m., we attended a brief meeting with the project coordinator, who outlined our schedule and tasks for the week. After the meeting, two PXL students, who were both familiar with the city and part of the project, offered to give us a quick tour of Hasselt. We walked around for around 30-45 minutes, getting acquainted with the city’s layout and atmosphere. When the tour concluded, we returned to the hostel and went back to our rooms, ready to start the week ahead.