The interesting prospects spring always brings….

I place my fingers on my keyboard and try to put my otherwise chaotic thoughts on screen but nothing is forthcoming. What could the matter be? Am I suffering a case of writers block? or could it be that my thoughts are meaningless and their entropic state is simply a reflection of my dreams; unpredictable and disorganized.

I have a simple one word answer to all the various questions posed above…. ‘EXCITEMENT’ . Yes excitement, within the next 1.5 months I will have made my first meaningful robot, a robot whose intelligence can be applied in real life situations, an industrial robot. But you see, that is only half of the reason for my excited state, I also get to introduce some more advanced features into HAOSCAR which can only make it better at what it does (providing high availability). With these two projects occurring simultaneously I have every reason to be excited. Enough about me…lets get into the nitty gritty of the details.

In the past I could only dream of one day taking part in a robot competition but this quarter this dream will be realized. This year the competition will be a marathon of three (3) events; maze solving, sumo wrestling and finally best design competitions. The robot we (my team of two) will be building will not be taking part in any of these events instead we volunteered to build a robot that could be used as an industrial robot. This robot will be required to locate cans of particular colors and transport them to different pre-determined locations depending on the color of the can. To add to its complexity the robot will be required to navigate around barbie doll obstacles in its path . A link to the full description is here

In the case of HA-OSCAR, I was charged with the task of introducing a new level of resiliency by integrating a distributed replicated block device (DRBD). Modifying HA-OSCAR to install and configure drbd and also modifying drbd to adhere to the policies of HA-OSCAR will no doubt be challenging.

With all these, it is evident that I have yet another very interesting quarter ahead of me therefore I have every reason to be excited.

In my next blog post I will describe in detail the algorithm we will use to solve the industrial robot problem and also update information about the progress of HA-OSCAR.

~ by Chuka on March 16, 2008.