Category Archives: Phil

Phil 10.9.13

8:30 – 1:30 SR

  • Ungodly traffic this morning.
  • Backups
  • Deployed new FA and RA, plus some new scripts.
  • Cognos data is wrong in that amounts in excess of the budget are being calculated from expenditures. The >100% rule might fix this, but I’m worried that in may need to be more sophisticated.
  • Did a Cognos upload of 1300 records with logging turned on that really slowed down Tomcat, including things like logging in. Accessing the published data REST servlet on the server worked fine though. Not sure what the deal is. I turned off logging to the DB and restarted the server, which sped things up. We need to try another Cognos ingest to see what happens. Lenny did one this morning that took a fraction of the time of the later one.
  • At the very least, we’re going to need to deal with user reactions to an apparently hung system with a dialog or something.
  • Burning September status to disk.

1:30 – 4:30 FP

  • Done with table. Back to writing.

Phil 10.4.13

8:00 – 4:00 FP

  • Basically banging away on the paper. Abstract, Introduction, Previous Work, Experiment are done. About halfway through results. Might finish first draft on Monday?

Phil 10.3.13

8:00 – 9:00 SR

  • Checking to see if Lenny can come over and help, since he’s stuck at home.
  • Doing some research into the new Flash applications

9:00 – 4:00 FP

Phil 10.2.13

8:30 – 10:30 SR

  • Working out a plan with Dong about what to do with our time. I’m guessing that the shutdown will last until at least Oct 17. The following is for the rest of this week:
    • Fix Script to add EA Cognos data plus autofill  (Obligations_outlays)
    • enter Contract Number in Invoice Entry (RA)
    • allow commas, periods in data entry (RA)
    • add Invoice Viewer in RA for the selected Req
    • Get all code up and running on FGMDEV
    • Drop maven and go to eclipse-based projects
    • Default combobox capability.
    • Create an “table_errors” table that has the application, user, date, time, query and error message, and take out the “Mail to Admin note”
  • For next week, add #include for python module storage and assembly.

10:30 – 4:30 FP

  • Finished Annotated Bibliography. Experimental design is next.

Phil 10.1.13

8:00 – 4:00 FP

  • I’m guessing this is what I charge to for a while
  • In meeting with Dr. Kuber, I brought up something that I’ve been thinking about since the weekend. The interface works, provably so. The pilot study shows that it can be used for (a) training and (b) “useful” work. If the goal is to produce “blue collar telecommuting”, then the question becomes, how do we actually achieve that? A dumb master-slave system makes very little sense for a few reasons:
    • Time lag. It may not be possible to always get a fast enough response loop to make haptics work well
    • Machine intelligence. With robots coming online like Baxter, there is certainly some level of autonomy that the on-site robot can perform. So, what’s a good human-robot synergy?
  • I’m thinking that a hybrid virtual/physical interface might be interesting.
    • The robotic workcell is constantly scanned and digitized by cameras. The data is then turned into models of the items that the robot is to work with.
    • These items are rendered locally to the operator, who manipulates the virtual objects using tight-loop haptics, 3D graphics, etc. Since (often?) the space is well known, the objects can be rendered from a library of CAD-correct parts.
    • The operator manipulates the virtual objects. The robot follows the “path” laid down by the operator. The position and behavior of the actual robot is represented in some way (ghost image, warning bar, etc). This is known as Mediated Teleoperation, and described nicely in this paper.
    • The novel part, at least as far as I can determine at this point is using mediated telepresence to train a robot in a task:
      • The operator can instruct the robot to learn some or all of a particular procedure. This probably entails setting entry, exit, and error conditions for tasks, which the operator is able to create on the local workstation.
      • It is reasonable to expect that in many cases, this sort of work will be a mix of manual control and automated behavior. For example, placing of a part may be manual, but screwing a bolt into place to a particular torque could be entirely automatic. If a robot’s behavior is made  fully autonomous, the operator needs simply to monitor the system for errors or non-optimal behavior. At that point, the operator could engage another robot and repeat the above process.
      • User interfaces that inform the operator when the robot is coming out of autonomous modes in a seamless way need to be explored.

Phil 9.27.13

8:00 – 11:30 SR

  • Parent projects can only be created if there are no REQ’s. If there are, pop up a dialog that says REQ’s must be eliminated. A parent project has no visible REQ tab.
  • Add table_combobox_defaults with 3 columns 1) Editable, 2) Default value, 3) Table name
  • Unresolved discussion about REQ tracking discussion with Lenny.
  • Timesheets.

11:30 – FP

  • More paper

Phil 9.25.13

8:00 – 1:00 SR

  • Backups
  • Got my permissions straightened out in Xacta!
  • Deploying new FA with DB changes today
  • Tangie needs status reports by next Tuesday
  • Create an “table_errors” table that has the application, user, date, time, query and error message, and take out the “Mail to Admin note”
  • Project Budget info has scroll bars. It needs tooltips instead
  • Budget info needs to be cumulative – i.e. add the current month to the previous month inside the Cognos script;

Phil 0.24.13

8:00 – 11:00 SR

  • Big wreck on 95 this morning meant back roads coming in. Actually very pleasant commute 🙂
  • Backups
  • Continuing my server paperwork saga.
  • Subprojects are back!
    • Add “SubProject” to project information titlebar
    • Copy info from parent (Project Budget info, etc)
    • It might be possible to calculate some budget components. Not sure if needed.

11:00 – FP

  • Got dispensation to drop the headset paper. Working on the Phantom paper.

Phil 9.20.13

8:00 – 10:00SR

  • Backups
  • Talked to Carla, the presentation went well and the customer likes the new version. There is an email with issues that I don’t have yet, but what I’ve heard so far is
    • No way to search for contracts
    • Contract info isn’t populating in the invoice
  • Meeting with Chris, Dong and Lenny. Notes on the Req’s page.

10:00 – 4:00 FP

  • Incorporated the results from yesterday’s runs. And we now have significant results for task completion times and task errors. Pretty cool.
  • Back to working on the paper.

Phil 9.19.13

8:00 – 11:00, 3:00 – 4:30 SR

  • Backups
  • Attempted to deploy, but for some reason an old SWF was on the disk
  • Redeployed new version in the afternoon. Success!

11:00 – 2:00 FP

  • Worked on paper. I think I have a concept that fits the data. It will be two parts. The first will focus on the pilot study and the hardware/software. The second will focus on a more complete test of how multimodal rendering systems (Visual, haptic, tactile, aural) can enhance/support interaction as the visual channel is attenuated.
  • Ran two more tests through the system. Need to incorporate the data and rerun the statistics. I think I also want to run the fastst 50% raw times. It occurs to me that there should be a minimum time to achieve the task (20-ish seconds?), and those that are closest to that time are by definition experts. This also leads to a way of classifying the users in a more meaningful way along a continuum from novice to expert.

2:00 – 3:00 Leave

  • Had to catch up on class readings before meeting at 6:00. Worried that the afternoon install might run long.