Day 1: Kicking off our robotics project

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 morning was spent learning the basics of the system we would be using to steer the robot and setting up the different programs we would need for the rest of the week.

The brewery

We had a 2-hour-long noon break, after which we were expected at the Brewmine-TAP in the center of Hasselt. Here, a nice lady told us about five different types of beer. Each beer was accompanied by a different kind of chocolate, whose taste was supposed to complement the beer. All of us had the opportunity to taste each type of beer and chocolate. Some people enjoyed this more than others.


All in all, it was interesting to see Hasselt’s spin on these two products that have been enjoyed by the Belgian people for centuries, and we were glad we got to experience them.

The welcome dinner

After the brewery, we again had a 2-hour-long break. We explored the city a little more, then headed back to the hostel and prepared ourselves for the welcome dinner at PXL.

Once there, we were promptly seated and we all got to enjoy freshly made pizza prepared by a lone chef who managed to serve what seemed to be a table of 25–30 people, which was very impressive. Our opinions varied, but it wasn’t bad by any means, and it was both a nice way to end our first day and start off the project.

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