Jacqueline Kory-Westlund

Aeronautics Student Forum

Wednesday, August 4th. 10AM. The Aeronautics Student Forum.

My lab is lined up in the front row, fidgeting, exchanging nervous glances. We trade seats between the other students' presentations, taking turns with the laptop to read over the half-done powerpoint.

The motion tracking camera system is set up (we were in the building until 10pm the previous night, testing our hardware and software, ensuring it'd all be ready to demo). One of the cameras lurks beside the white screen, ominous, a constant reminder that it's our turn in an hour, and like or not, we don't have our finalized slides and some of us don't even know for sure whether we'll be speaking.

It was nerve-wracking.

It was also remarkably exciting.

Presentations, preparation, control

I usually plan presentations out to the last sentence. I know I'm not an improv whiz, so I practice my talk out loud over and over. Any slides I have, they're done at least two nights ahead of time. Practice, preparation, organization. No need to worry because I have everything under control.

This presentation at the aero forum was the opposite.

The previous week, to the relief of my labmates, I'd tried to organize everything (the slides, the talks, the demo). But our mentor, Garry, told us not to worry about any of it. He kept repeating that: don't worry. It's just a presentation.

None of us were convinced.

It wasn't until Garry sat down with me and explained what he had in mind--how he was going to help compile photos and diagrams into a logical order--that I trusted he was right. No need to worry. He had given scores of presentations. He had good ideas. He frequently pulled things together last-minute. It'd be okay.

In short, when he explained that, I consciously relinquished control. I mentioned control (and the lack thereof) in the context of volleyball games with my lab. The same idea comes into play here: Setting perfectionism aside, trusting that someone else is competent enough to get the job done. Teamwork. All that good stuff.

Coming together last-minute

Garry showed up not long after 10AM, printed copies of the finalized powerpoint in hand. As our time slot approached, my labmates and I shuffled discretely through the slides, still worried, still anxious.

Our turn came. We trooped up to the podium, all nine of us. We spoke. Twenty minutes, all told (not too long, really), plus the demo. We explained our newly established Autonomous Vehicle Lab, its capabilities, and what the audience would see in the demo. We flew our quadcopter. We demonstrated object tracking and obstacle avoidance.

It went well. It went better than well: our presentation was splendid.

Everyone knew what to say. Everyone was clear, concise, and comprehensible. Perhaps it was because we were not prepared that we were prepared: rehearsing, in our minds, coherent sentences about our parts of the project. Recapitulating our work with the quadcopters, the DGPS system, the Vicon cameras, the many vehicles and pieces of software. Unsure of what we would need to say, and thus, preparing for the worst.

If not for Garry's persistent "don't worry about it"s, I would never have experienced a presentation this way. I'd have planned out that talk and every one after, never daring take a chance on not preparing enough and not practicing enough. Now I know. Our aero forum talk was proof: Things can come together last-minute.

That said, I think I still like having my slides done more than an hour before the presentation. As engrossing an adventure as it was, last-minute isn't going to become my style.

An awesome NASA summer internship

Summarizing 10 weeks is difficult in any circumstances, but when those weeks are spent as an intern in the Langley Aerospace Research Summer Scholars program, working at a NASA center with a ton of awesome people, it's even more difficult.

But I'll try.

I worked with a systems engineering team to develop and integrate the software and hardware needed for comparable indoor and outdoor tests of autonomous, unmanned multi-vehicle flight control.

In plain English, that means we were developing ways of testing flying robots both inside and outside.

Ten interns, including me, were in the lab on workdays. That was not counting our mentor, Garry D. Qualls, or the slew of friends and colleagues who drop by on a frequent—if irregular—basis. Most are engineers of some variety; the others are pursuing degrees with the word "computer" in the title.

Me, I'm a cognitive scientist.

I hail from Northern California and attend Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

Although my academic focus has been on embodied agents and robotics applications of cognitive science, I've studied with Vassar's multidisciplinary stew of psychologists, biologists, philosophers, anthropologists, and computer scientists.

During my first week at Langley, it quickly became clear to me that my coursework had not prepared me to do all the things my lab's engineers could do. I had not studied mechanics, controls or circuits. I was not a whiz at soldering, nor did I understand the intricacies of aeronautics.

What I could do, however, was be versatile.

I programmed microcontrollers in C and C++, then switched to Java to write code to parse and display real-time data. I evaluated possible ground control station software options, dug through an open source flight simulator and covered the lab's white boards with organizational diagrams. When it was time to develop communication links between more than six different programs, I eagerly helped decipher network protocols and data packets.

I even chased our miniature Parking Lot Exploration Rover across the pavement in 105-degree weather while testing a navigation algorithm.

Most of my time at Langley, no matter what the activity, was spent learning. My lab mates have remarkable skill-sets, and we're all willing to share our expertise.

Our electrical engineers taught me not to fear wires and breadboards. I began to understand the theory behind PID (proportional-integral-derivative) controls with the help of our aerospace engineers, drawing on distant memories of calculus and knowledge of behavior-based robotics algorithms.

In return, I helped lab mates sort through debugging messages and null pointer exceptions, while occasionally spouting interesting facts about brains. I spent some quality time with software. I'm graduating from Vassar in the spring with a minor in computer science in addition to my cognitive science major. This summer's work has solidly demonstrated that knowing the syntax isn't the same as using it in meaningful ways.

But working in Garry Qualls' lab is not just about acquiring technical skills and applying knowledge learned in classrooms.

With so many interns tackling parts of the same project, communication is crucial. We've all had to learn to deal with each other. Our respective idiosyncrasies and backgrounds sometimes make that difficult. More than once, I found that a lab mate was simply looking at a problem from a different point of view than I was—a view that, prior to our disagreement, I hadn't thought to question.

I enjoyed having the opportunity to re-examine my perspective and those previously unrecognized assumptions.

This summer has been fantastic. I got to see my lab transition from conducting chaos to smoothly functioning as a team as we worked together to establish an autonomous vehicle testing facility.

Inside, an infrared camera system tracked the vehicles. Data from this system and from the vehicles was fed to navigation controllers, a flight management system and real-time visual displays. Outside, after we swapped the camera system for a differential GPS system, we could run the exact same tests with the vehicles.

My experience as a LARSS intern has been inspiring. I'm not entirely sure where I'm headed next—graduate school, that enigmatic first job after college, writing the next great sci-fi novel—but it'll have to be fantastic to beat this summer.

—

This article originally appeared on NASA Langley Research Center Researcher News, August 18, 2010

In late July, a solicitation went out to all the Langley summer interns requesting that ten or so people write articles about their summer experiences. It arrived in my inbox alongside the usual selection of notifications, casual correspondence, and informative messages about upcoming activities. I almost passed it by, thinking someone else will respond. It occurred to me, however, that I know how to write. I could thread a story of my summer experiences into an entertaining and cohesive narrative of 500-750 words. So I did.

The article I wrote about my LARSS internship for the Langley Researcher News is up at An Intern's Story: A Time to Test Flying Robots.

I encourage you to take a look!

A new sport

One of the difficult parts of playing a new sport is that I'm not good at it yet.

My lab played volleyball this summer. Every Wednesday after work, we trotted out to the grass behind the conference center, doing our best not to complain about the humidity and heat. We greeted the other two teams in the league (both of which had clearly played volleyball before--not just in gym class in high school, or, in my case, once during a summer program five years ago), we helped set up the nets, and we began bumping a ball around.

Volleyball was not where any of us excelled. Sure, by the end of the ten weeks, everyone in the lab had improved. We could do what might be called a volley. I could be in the right place at the right time to hit the ball, even if the ball then flew off in completely unintentional directions. When I served, the probability that the ball would both get over the net and stay in bounds was greater than chance (if I remembered to stand on the right, that is, because my serves always flew too far left). It was great fun.

It was also frustrating. I knew that given enough practice, I could be a half-decent volleyballer. Instead of the game being a matter of physical skills and pure luck, it could evolve into a complex, strategic battle, with us setting up plays and plotting out how to outwit the other team. But ten weeks isn't quite long enough to get us to that point. (Sometimes, I'm impatient.) We lost just about every match played against the other teams.

Losing is hard to watch

My lab had split into two teams and recruited a few extra interns, so most days, the five or six of us on my team rotated through four spots on the court. This meant that some games, I stood on the sidelines during the game point.

That was difficult.

I had no direct control over whether we won or lost. I had to stand there, watching, as hands missed the ball, as the ball smacked the dusty grass, or flew too far out of bounds. I had no power over how hard my teammates tried (whether they desired to win enough to dive after the ball; whether they were tired and sweaty and just wanted it to be over). I could be a cheerleader, but I could not actively influence the outcome of the game.

That was new.

My usual sport is fencing: highly individual, always solo. When you're on the strip, it's just you. If you mess up, if you lose, you only have yourself to blame. Even in team competitions, you're just adding up the scores you and your teammates have separately acquired. You don't realize, unless you've been part of a team, how important it is to trust your teammates. And that's what made volleyball difficult: because none of us were that good, it wasn't easy to trust my teammates to be there, backing me up, putting in their best effort to win even though the games were casual and couldn't be taken seriously given our level of experience.

The thing about trust is, most times, it has to be earned.

Trust and control

Fortunately for my lab, playing volleyball is not what we did full-time. When working on our summer project--establishing the Autonomous Vehicle Lab--I learned I could trust my labmates to have my back. We all cared about the outcome; we could trust each other to each do our part. Not being in control of every little detail (and occasionally standing on the sidelines) was okay, because I knew my labmates were trying just as hard as I was to debug their programs and get the quadcopters flying.

I guess the moral of the story is (besides the obvious "teamwork requires trust"), if you ever have the chance to play a new sport, do so. You never know what you'll learn.

My labmate Jake and I are in the NASA Langley photo of the week!

The photographer talked to us at the summer intern poster session last Wednesday. He saw our videos of the quadcopters in flight, rightly decided that these particular aerial vehicles are awesome, and asked us if we would mind a quick photo shoot.

It pays to work with cool robots.