Hi!
My name is Gilbert Montague and I am an intern this summer with OpenROV. My undergraduate degree is in Physics but I am no stranger to robotics. I was an intern for eight months at the NASA Kennedy Space Center working on a swarming robotics project and then spent another eight months at the NASA Langley Autonomy Incubator developing software for Small Unmanned Aerial Systems.
I wanted to use this thread to introduce myself to the awesome OpenROV community, and also as a platform to document my progress. Feel free to pop in to contribute, give advice, or just say hello!
I will be mostly involved in the software side of things this summer. Specifically, I will be spending most of my time with firmware, computer vision, and coffee consumption.
Firmware
For the first week, or so, I will be contributing to the firmware of the robots with the primary focus being implementing a new way for the various software modules to share information with each other. The proposed architecture will use Google’s Protocol Buffers.
Protocol buffers are Google’s language-neutral, platform-neutral, extensible mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages.
Computer Vision
Wouldn’t it be cool if the ROV could visually track an interesting object, such as a fish? Well, this is the first computer vision project I plan to tackle. If you have any other exciting computer vision projects you would like to see implemented, contact me or post in this thread. More on this later.
I am super excited to a part of the OpenROV team and community. Again, please feel free to stop by this thread to say hello and brainstorm.