Recently, our lab received a visit from Douglas Steele, Ph.D. Apparently, he’s the Senior Vice President for Food and Natural Resources at the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities. I didn’t know this until Dr. Li told me. A little-known fact is that this is not the first senior vice president we have hosted: Scott Angle also visited our lab last year (in an event which I apparently didn’t see fit to write about), although he is a much more local Senior Vice President.
When a VIP visits our lab, Dr. Li usually gives them a short presentation, and then asks us to give a bunch of different demos. I was in charge of MARS, unsurprisingly. This wasn’t very complicated; mostly, I put on the stereo cameras, and then I drove it around and captured some videos. I keep having to remind myself that merely seeing a giant robot move is impressive to the average person. For me, it’s Tuesday.
Chenjiao demonstrated the 360-degree photo booth that Dr. Boz thinks would be great at department parties, but which we’ve mostly been using to scan pepper plants. Unfortunately, the plant that he chose to use for the demo was perhaps slightly more dead than was optimal.
Also, David, one of our undergraduate students, demonstrated our new UR7e robotic arm. That thing on the end is an experimental gripper for blueberry harvesting that someone in our lab designed.
Overall, I think the demos went well! At least, Dr. Steele appears to be smiling in this group photo. That’s probably the best we can do.
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