During my first week of the CRA-WP DREU summer program, I continued working on a fog screen device project. I began this project during the spring semester with the goal of developing a fog screen for robots to communicate through spatial augmented reality (AR) in environments lacking conventional projectable surfaces.

In the spring semester, we successfully designed and built a working prototype of the fog screen. The prototype consists of a fog machine, eight fans, and a projector, with the fog machine mounted on the base of a Fetch robot. However, the fog screen machine had some flaws that needed addressing. The fog machine was not powerful enough to create a dense and lasting fog, and the projected image was not clear.

Therefore, my objective for the summer is to improve the fog screen machine. In the first week of the program, my lab partners and I built a remote controller for our new fog machine. We decided to build a controller because we couldn’t connect the out-of-the-box controller to the Fetch robot. We want our design to be autonomous, meaning that the Fetch robot should be able to control the fog machine without human intervention. I also wrote a C++ and Arduino program so that the Fetch robot can communicate with the Arduino board that controls the fog machine. I also, documented all the details of the controller in our research paper.

Furthermore, I started the UR2PHD summer class.