A New Life in Reno

Dear Diary, If I had to find an expression to describe these last 2 months I would say "Research Madness". I'm gonna use this expression later on, so keep that in mind. Here a brief summary of what happened in the past months. Moving to Trondheim, Norway This is going to be my last post from the US. My advisor is moving to Norway, and I would following to the end of the world cause he is simply the best. What's the purpose of staying here if I cannot work with him? Effective 15th of November, I will start working for NTNU In case some Italian friend is reading this, I will land in Venice Sat. 24th and if I am negative to COVIDDI I should be able to say hi to some of you  I am an uncle! Exactly, my sister got a baby (she's obviously spamming pics all over the family communication media) and I can't wait to see her, she is so puffy! Last Lake Tahoe trip This was probably one of the best days at the lake ever. A full day swimming, juggling, hand standing and clim...

Holy guacamole!  has it been an eventful three months. Not only could I write an entire blog about just these three months I could write my entire dissertation on them!  Let's start with May, which feels like it was decades ago at this point. In May we started "Family Dinners" with my housemates, the food was exquisite and the company was even better. We made all our food over a campfire one night and had BFD (Breakfast for Dinner) another night. My favorite housemate has also gone crazy and is baking something new each day, though she never eats much of what she makes and I end up eating the rest (this is not a complaint however seeing as my world revolves around food, and her baking happens to be excellent despite the fact that she burns everything she cooks).  We also went on a beautiful hike along the Truckee River and swam I looked for a cool death defying rock to jump off of but alas no such place presented itself and I had to be satified with a light swim in a very...

I am back! Everything is fine. Even during these Covidays. Even more busy than usual, the end of the semester is coming. And summer is watching me from the outside whispering "come oooouuuttt!" These pas few weeks have been crazy. I moved the entire set of stuff I need to work on my project between my room and the garage. I feel a little bit like Dr. Rick. Here is the accustomed summary. Post - DARPA competition We got some rest days. We earned them I suppose. We were so stressed that people started to show up again in the lab only after one entire week. And it feels really weird when you are used to spend 18 hours straight on average with the same people, every day (Sat & Sun included), working side by side, and, suddenly, everybody is gone.  I took the chance to keep up with the studies (I missed 2 months of lessons) and it went poorly: I finally started working on my research project! So I switched to that 24/7 Fast Resilient Micro Flyer The idea ...

Dear Blog. This whole month was dedicated to the Darpa SubT Challenge: our team (Cerberus) is composed by different entities from all around the world so you can image how hard is to organize meetings between Zurich, Reno, Oxford and Berkeley. Two weeks to go Two weeks before moving to Seattle, the place where the competition took place, our team mates from Zurich landed in Reno for a full-time integration phase. And guess what? The head of the Zurich team is Italian! (yes, capital I). I missed Europe so much and spending a so intense amount of time with europeans I think made me even more malinchonic (I know, I am a sentimental person!). I am not allowed to describe in details how all our algorithms work, but the logic is to use both ground, legged and flying robots to exend as much as possible the total explored space. I was so lucky I could even calibrate the VI system on Anymal! That was so much fun. Aaaaah I love robots!! Trip to lake Tahoe I was here alr...

Dear Blog, These past weeks have been insane. I almost thought about stopping training to leave time for study and research.  BUT NOT TODAY. This is the past month summary (I know, huge delay) Exams At the end of the semester I had to to finals, and I survived. The problem, as usual, is doing great at the same time in research and academic. But I guess I am good for now. Overall all the classes I took so far were interesting and well presented (one of them particularly hard). Gettin Ready for the Darpa SubT Challenge https://www.subtchallenge.com/ In one word? Chaos. The lab is a mess, everyone was crazy, the production level raised by 200%, everybody working like no tomorrow from 8am to 3am the next day and repeat. Kinda experience I would say. If you never tried the feeling of writing code all night long, you should try! Bday! The best moment ever? trying to light up a candle with a power supply without burning the whol...

Dear Blog, I have to apologize for this extreme delay, but this period is really cray. I barely have time to eat proper meals and sometimes the schedule is so strict that I have to skip them. As usual, I will try to summarize the major events happened this month, hope this does not bother you! Shehryar's PhD Defense Our Senior PhD guy graduated! It was my first attendance to such an event and it was really intense. This guy is basically a genius and the lab (and myself personally) is going to miss him so much. His work on multi-modal state estimation in visually-degraded environments is amazing, he literally invented the thermal-inertial odometry. Such a great inspiration! Here is a pic we took that glorious day (fleet of robots included for sure). The Mihirs are gone If so much joy happend at the graduation day, I also had to experience a moment of sadness when the two indian guys, who were in the lab for their master thesis, had to go back to their country. We had...