Working in Germany

I thought I'd write a little bit about my work today, so that my family can know what I am up to. Yesterday, I spent a lot of my day with a robotics post-doc that I really like. He does cool work and always has some interesting student who is really sharp. I taught them what I know about full-body motion tracking. That was the first publication I got out of being here in Germany. See the photograph of the skeleton I use to track a person in motion in a large space. ;)

Now I'm working with a linear treadmill and they are currently building an omni-directional treadmill-- which is really cool! :) I'll send photographs of these items later. For now, I'm going to attach a photograph of a robotic wheelchair that I've worked on since I got here. It is frustrating a lot of the times to program this thing, but at least two experiments have used the wheelchair and at least in part because of conversations I had with my boss about buying this wheelchair, along with me having the patience to program it. So that feels good to have actually done some good work. ;)

I'm currently awaiting the decision from a conference that I have been wanting to go to for years. One of my students this past summer was able to submit a paper to IEEE-VR and I am hopeful that her paper will get in. ;) She is also returning this coming January to work with me and the robotics post-doc that I mentioned earlier. If that paper gets in, I'll devote a whole blog to the setup that was used in that experiment- since I also did a similar experiment years ago in the "PanoLab". It is one of our nicest setups here at MPI.

I like my work- most of the time! :) At least I get to do fun things. It might be nice to also help people, as I did when I was an undergraduate and worked on surgical simulators. Perhaps I will return to that someday.