Week 5- 21 June 2024

HALF WAY DONE!! This week officially marks my half way point into the REU. Anisha (the other DREU student) and I were able to finish debugging our code, restructuring it so that the algorithm is now using a standard Markov Decision Process (MDP) and implement a basic Q-Learning algorithm and uses the same environment to run multiple tasks. We were able to make the robot arm stack two objects on top of one another and also find the shortest path for a 3x3 grid to push a cup from start to end state. This was a very rewarding experience and also challenging as neither of us has any experience doing this. We did run into lots of difficulties and bugs and sought help from the lab members and the postdoc researcher. Anisha and I also started a research course by CRA - [UR2PHD] (https://cra.org/ur2phd/) which is going to be conducted over the course of 4 weeks with 3 two hour sessions in a week where we will learn crucial research methods and also give a research proposal at the end of the course. There are daily assignments for the course which I was also doing for the week including a Mentor-Mentee contract for which Elaine (my mentor) and I sat down together and discussed our goals for the research experience; I found this very helpful because it helped us come on the same page regarding the next 5 weeks.