Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh published an article online about New Mexico Tech graduate Tessa Guengerich.  She is finishing a summer internship at the Robotics Institute Summer Scholars program. Guengerich earned her bachelor's in chemical engineering at NMT this year. 

Here is an excerpt of the article. Click the link at the bottom of the page for the full article.

(Pictured: Tessa Guengerich reacts to her robot's successful demonstration at a recent event at Carnegie Mellon University. Photo courtesy of Mobility21/Carnegie Mellon.)

In June, Mobility21 welcomed Tessa Guengerich as part of this year’s CMU Robotics Institute Summer Scholars (RISS) program. [A graduate of ] New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, she arrived in Pittsburgh hoping to learn more about machine learning and programming and learn more about the implementation of robots outside of academia.

Tessa said she was excited to learn about things she wasn’t exposed to before (computational statistics and machine learning) and was also excited to be surrounded by other students from around the world.

Six weeks later, Tessa provided this update on her experience:

"On my project with Isaac [Isukapati, Project Scientist, at CMU’s NREC: National Robotics Engineering Center], I’m learning a lot about computational statistics and algorithms, and I’m coding in C++ for the first time.

I’ve faced a bit of a learning curve, but it’s a challenge I’ve been able to face thus far. The overall project is to write a scheduling program for robotic arms performing specific tasks — for example, given X robotic arms and Y objects, what’s the best course of action for the robotic arms to move those objects safely and efficiently? My contribution to the project is to write a statistical simulator to test the performance of the scheduler with a specific set of parameters, to see where the scheduler performs well and where it fails."

 

 

Click here for the full article