Jacqueline Kory-Westlund

Wallops photos!

Earlier this month, everyone in my lab took a trip to NASA Wallops Flight Facility and Assateague State Park to test GROVER2 on the beach. There's a video of some of the lab's preparations over on Geeked on Goddard - take a look! Although I'm not specifically working on GROVER2 (I'm working on the LIDAR-assisted robotic group exploration project, as briefly mentioned earlier), it was a good trip.

A few photos:

A control center we saw while touring the Wallops facilities

One of the ballons constructed by the Wallops balloon program researchers

We spent the night at Wallops; I spent three minutes outside taking photos of the sky and was bitten at least five times by mosquitos

We were on the beach bright and early! I took a bunch of photos of the sunrise

GROVER2's first field tests on the beach.

A new semester...

Long time, no writing -- it's the start of a new semester (my last semester!) and I've been busy with a number of different things:

• The VC Women's Fencing team. We're in full competition mode. We conquered in Cleveland recently, vanquished difficult foes at Brown University, and are gearing up for a big match at Wellesley next Sunday, which will decide whether we claim the Northeast Conference Championship this year!

• My undergraduate cognitive science thesis. I'm looking at the emergent behavior of a group of simulated prey robots that can communicate with each other about the presence of a predator. I have questions about communication, environment, and motivation. Being a year-long project, I'm supposedly halfway through, though in reality, it's not so clear-cut. I spent all summer reading papers and doing background research, filled last semester with hypotheses, possible architectures, and more background research, wrote up a first draft this winter break, and am now hard at work on the simulation itself.

• Taking photos of the weather. An unusually large amount of snow has fallen at Vassar -- what better to do than document it with a camera? (Click for larger versions.)

Sunset Lake II

Snow Forest

Winter picnic in Cleveland

• Figuring out my post-graduation life. On the advice of many folks, I'm not heading immediately to grad school. My enthusiasm for learning, research, and knowledge hasn't vanished -- quite the contrary. I'm going to spend at least a year exploring the places outside the classroom, longer depending on where I end up. Academia-land? The wide world beyond? Still up in the air.

Which is your favorite season?

Usually, I can't decide. But when my Hudson valley campus is decked out in full-blown autumn colors, my vote swings in favor of chill fall air, feet crunching through drifts of leaves, and myriad shades of red, brown, orange, and yellow.

Yes, I do, on occasion, meander across campus with my camera. Click for the larger versions!

Sunset Lake

View from the room

Branch of doom

Red glow tree

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.