Aditya Kamath's Weblog

Lunabotics

Wed, 22 May 2013 23:37:38 -0400

These days are tiring, guys! New posts all coming after the competition ends. Days have been great: saw many new robots, alligators, manatees and tomorrow, we’ll be off to see the Delta 4 Launch! :D

Other posts soon!

Yankee Stadium, Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center,...

Sun, 19 May 2013 14:07:07 -0400

Yankee Stadium, Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, ToysRus, Madame Tussauds NY, Ripley’s Believe It Or Not

Times Square part 2

Sun, 19 May 2013 14:04:14 -0400

Times Square part 2

Times Square part 1

Sun, 19 May 2013 14:00:02 -0400

Times Square part 1

Hong Kong International Airport and the pics from the flight to...

Sun, 19 May 2013 13:46:19 -0400

Hong Kong International Airport and the pics from the flight to New York!

Hong Kong - New York - Orlando and assembling the robot

Sun, 19 May 2013 13:05:37 -0400

So, its been almost been more than a day since I last posted. Lots have happened since then. Hong Kong airport first. Massive airport. Massive crowd (well, we all know of China’s population woes). Real amazing place. Free wifi was one of the best things to happen. Unlike Indian airports where the wifi works for twenty minutes or so for free, this was quite the surprise. To dampen our spirits (literally), it started raining. Like crazy. Two flights got cancelled from near where we were sitting and that got us real worried. Luckily this did not last long, we were all clear to go. Meanwhile upon suggestion from a friend from Hong Kong itself, I tried some Chinese food - real cool!

Well after some real fun hours at the Hong Kong International Airport, we boarded our flight which we will be cooped in for the next sixteen hours. Luckily we had amazing surprises planned for us. From views from snow capped mountains on the north eastern side of Russia to the polar caps of the Arctic Bay and flying over the Magnetic North Pole, our trip was really cool! Finally after not sleeping, one season of 30 Rock, one season of Two and a Half Men, and Zero Dark Thirty later, we finally reached the John F. Kennedy International Airport. Did I say that the Hong Kong International Airport was massive? Well, this was even more gigantic! With a real cool train running through the terminals, we found our way towards the necessary terminal and then to Jamaica Station with ease. Now, we had eighteen hours in NYC and we had to keep our bags somewhere. No baggage storage services open at 1 am in the morning. We were so screwed!

Luckily we found an Indian cab driver who took us to Manhattan and helped us with our bags and kept them in his house nearby. Indian-Indian bhaichara is so amazing! Now started one of the best twelve hours of our journey. Times Square. Empire State Building. Rockefeller Center. Yankee Stadium. Road-side Hot Dogs. Yellow Cab Rides. The NYC Subway Rides. Window Shopping at some of the best brands in the world. We did walk much of the time, so our legs were all screwed but who really cares? We had the time of our lives!

We then flew to Orlando - I do not really want to speak more about the trip; it was totally uninteresting during the flight. Except the real awesome pizza; yes that was the best! Finally reached the Holiday Inn at 1 am in the morning. Slept off to wake up for a nice hot breakfast, where we also met from Sydney Lunabotics, a team from Australia! The inn is cool, the people are awesome and I’m having the time of my life.

Well, now, our robot is all assembled and we’re going for a test in some time. Practice session tomorrow, competition begins the day after. More blog posts soon…

Signing off.
K-Math

NASA Trip: Phase 1 - Till Chennai International Airport.

Fri, 17 May 2013 02:47:22 -0400

After the last exam and lots of hours of hectic packing, it was finally time to leave Manipal. I hadn’t slept for more than two hours since the night before and the cab was late, sleep deprived and waiting in the excruciating heat and humidity of Manipal was seriously pissing off.

Luckily the cab arrived in about fifteen minutes and my pissed-off meter turned down a notch. But my worries wouldn’t stop so easily. The cab driver was one of the worst drivers I had seen, ever. He just couldn’t stop overtaking people on the roads and I had to stay awake hoping that there are no accidents. Damn.

Mangalore airport. Reached there finally. Paid the cab guy off, got inside the airport, checked in my baggage, got through security check; all cool. But weird stories just do not end so easily with me. My boarding pass had no gate number. It wasn’t so bad, I thought and I walked towards the screen displaying flight statuses. Wonder of wonders, no boarding gate number on the screen as well! Well, you can guess what might have happened next. Half the passengers entered the shuttle during the final call!

Well, finally I reached Bengaluru and then traveled to Chennai with ease. All cool there. Chennai domestic airport - brilliant place. Real awesome air conditioning, real helpful ground crew. The best part? The conveyor belts. Unlike traditional belts where the crew puts in the baggage from one corner, this one was more automated. The baggage came from an underground storage area from the middle of the conveyor belt ring and the bags slid onto the conveyor belt. The best part about this conveyor belt? When the bags were to slide onto the conveyor belt and if there was another bag in the way, the other bag stopped moving. Really cool!

Walked to the international terminal. In comparison with the awesomeness that was the domestic terminal, the international airport was literally shit. Over crowded, under organized, snobbish people who do not know Hindi/English or do not want to talk in anything other than Tamil, it was hell. We got into the check-in line almost at the end and then we got delayed as our multimeters were stopped by the Indian customs. Hungry and tired, we waited at a really mediocre waiting area (and with just 20 minutes of free wifi! Damn.) till the boarding commenced.

Really tired from typing all that; more later.
By the way, we’re now at the Hong Kong International Airport and are waiting for our connecting flight to New York! Can’t wait to explore the night-life in the Big Apple! :D New post soon.

Manual Bot test for Robocon

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 23:09:39 -0500

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The age of the Internet.

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 12:20:35 -0400

This isn’t an article of mine. I just read it on the internet and shared it; it is worth reading, no doubt.

‎..Dear Muslims, Christians, Hindus, and Jews,

You’re living in the age of the Internet. Your religion will be mocked, and the mockery will find its way to you. Get over it.

If you don’t, what’s happening this week will happen again and again. A couple of idiots with a video camera and an Internet connection will trigger riots across the globe. They’ll bait you into killing one another.

Stop it….Stop following their script.

Today, fury, violence, and bloodshed are consuming the Muslim world. Why? Because a bank fraud artist in California offered people $75 a day to come to his house and act out scenes that ostensibly had nothing to do with Islam. Then he replaced the audio, putting words in the actors’ mouths, and stitched together the scenes to make an absurdly bad movie ridiculing the Prophet Mohammed. He put out flyers to promote the movie. Nobody—literally nobody—came to watch it.

He posted a 14-minute video excerpt of the movie on YouTube, but hardly anyone noticed. Then, a week ago, an anti-Muslim activist in Virginia reposted the video with an Arabic translation and sent the link to activists and journalists in Egypt. An Egyptian TV show aired part of the video. An Egyptian politician denounced it. Clerics sounded the alarm. Through Facebook and Twitter, protesters were mobilized to descend on the U.S. embassy in Cairo. The uprising spread. The U.S. ambassador to Libya has been killed, and violence has engulfed other countries.

When the protests broke out, the guy who made the movie claimed to be an Israeli Jew funded by other Jews. That turned out be a lie. Now he says he’s a Coptic Christian, even though Coptic Christian leaders in Egypt and the United States despise the movie and want nothing to do with him. Another guy who helped make the movie claims to be a Buddhist. The movie was made in the United States, yet Sudanese mobs have attacked British and German embassies. Some Egyptians targeted the Dutch embassy, mistakenly thinking the Netherlands was behind the movie. Everyone’s looking for a group to blame and attack.

The men behind the movie said it would expose Islam as a violent religion. Now they’re pointing to the riots as proof. Muslims are “pre-programmed” to rage and kill, says the movie’s promoter. “Islam is a cancer,” says the director. According to the distributor, “The violence that it caused in Egypt is further evidence of how violent the religion and people are and it is evidence that everything in the film is factual.”

Congratulations, rioters. You followed the script perfectly. You did the propagandists’ work for them.

And the provocations won’t end here. Laws and censors won’t protect you from them. Liberal democracies allow freedom of expression. Our leaders and people condemn garbage like this video, but we don’t censor it. Even if we did, the diffusion of media technology makes suppression impossible. The director of this movie was forbidden, under his bank-fraud probation rules, from using computers or the Internet without approval. That didn’t stop him. Nor did it stop the Arabic-language distributor from reposting the video and disseminating it abroad.

Online propaganda is speech. But it’s also part of the global rise of lethal empowerment. It’s easier than ever to kill people. In Muslim countries, mass murderers favor bombs. In the United States, they prefer guns. In Japan, they’ve tried sarin nerve gas. The Oklahoma City bomber used fertilizer. The Sept. 11 hijackers used box cutters and passenger planes. Then came the letters filled with anthrax.

Derision is that much harder to control. The spread of digital technology and Internet bandwidth makes it possible to reach every corner of the globe almost instantly with homemade video defaming any faith tradition. It can become an incendiary weapon. But it has a weakness: It depends on you. You’re the detonator. If you don’t cooperate, the bomb doesn’t explode.

This isn’t just a Muslim problem, though that’s been the pattern lately. On YouTube, you can find videos insulting every religion on the planet: Jews, Christians, Hindus, Catholics, Mormons, Buddhists, and more. Some clips are ironic. Others are simply disgusting. Many were posted to bait one group into fighting another. The baiters are indiscriminate. The promoter of the Mohammed movie founded a group that also protests at Mormon temples.

The hatred and bloodshed will go on until you stop taking the bait. Mockery of your prophet on a computer with an Internet address somewhere in the world can no longer be your master. Nor can the puppet clerics who tell you to respond with violence. Lay down your stones and your anger. Go home and pray. God is too great to be troubled by the insults of fools. Follow Him.

(William Salatan - The Slate)

Summer 2012

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 14:08:00 -0400

It was one of those warm April nights when my phone lighted up with a new email. And that changed everythi ng. I forgot about my hectic day, the assignments, everything. I just had been accepted for a summer research internship at AGH University of Science and Technology, Krakow, Poland. God, I was so happy that night!Before I go ahead, I’d like to explain how I managed to reach an unheard place somewhere in Poland while people find it difficult to find an internship in India itself. Fortunately for me, Manipal University houses the Indian committee of an international organization called IAESTE that offers technical internships, traineeships and summer research programs for students in technical fields. And I owe a lot to them for this opportunity!

My first day at work was freaky. Department of Mechatronics and Robotics. Working under the director of the faculty. A professor with decades of teaching experience, and a (holy hell) 607 publications under his name. I hope you understand my fright at that time. But I was pleasantly surprised when I first met Professor T. Uhl. We shook hands warmly and talked about how I liked Poland. Quite friendly (as I have already mentioned!) indeed. Although my offer form said Swarm Robotics it was really amazing when my professor asked me what I wanted to work with. He looked pretty surprised when I said Control Systems. He introduced me to Dr. Buratowski (Henceforth Dr. B. I am lazy, my apologies), my mentor, another awe-worthy professor, one of the most amazing educators I have known of. Dr. B introduced me to a junior of his along with whom I was to do my first task. Simulate the control systems of a mono-wheeled robot using a Catia based simulation software and inputting control data values using Matlab to see the simulated output. Holy s**t. I was screwed. I was just a recent second year pass-out from an electronics background; all this was so darned intimidating! Okay, I did not mind learning new stuff, but MATLAB?! Gosh, I passed a lab using Matlab out of sheer luck! Luckily the college could provide me LabVIEW, of which I had some previous experience. The work finally got over! Finally!

It was only then that I was so much relieved that I started noticing the amazingness of the country I was in, in full detail. Poland is beautiful. Oh, and ever more so, especially as the UEFA Euro cup was going on in the same country! Even though there was no match in the city I was in (Krakow), the place was still colored in red and white. POLSKA! Bialo czerwoni! (Poland! The reds and whites) was a phrase heard all over! Thousands of people gathered in the fan zones to watch the match, drowning in a sea of beer when their team won, even more when teams lost. The air was filled with cheerfulness, which surprisingly was the same even when the Euro cup was done with. It was just the atmosphere of the place that changed it all! Work was great! By then, I had started work on my second task review and analysis of path planning algorithms in Mobile Robots. Purely theoretical. Lots of research work. Luckily Prof B. was amazing enough to let me work from my dorm room. That was so amazing for me, especially because of the amazing people I lived with, all interns with IAESTE. Poles, Indians, Romanians, Macedonians, Spaniards, Turks, Hungarians, Hong-Kongers, Japanese, Kazakhs, Ukrainians, SLOVAKIANS, Jordanians…the world was in Krakow, I felt.

It was so amazing, knowing that people from all over the world were ridiculously interested in India, the culture, the people, the food (especially!). It was really proud watching satisfied faces after tasting decently made butter-chicken. And Bollywood, I mustn’t forget about it! With the Indian film industry going overseas in fame, no stones were left unturned in Poland. These people knew all about Amitabh Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Rajnikant and Hritik Roshan (surprising, but true!). But that was not the best part, here’s the shocker. Guess which Indian song is famous amongst all the countries I mentioned up there? More than Jai Ho, perhaps?! Can’t? Here it is TUNAK TUNAK TUN by Daler Mehndi! Whoa, right?! While more than half of the current generation in India do not recollect watching the music video, almost all other interns there remembered the dance steps and the tune till the end of the video! Brilliant, I must say!

Well, anyways, I seem to be sidetracking a bit. Back to the internship story – All was going great! My second task was over and I was down to my final three. Small reviews. Mobile robots again. It was amazing as it left me enough time to go around places! Meet new people, see new places. Well, I might sound as if the internship wasn’t so technically inspiring for me, but I must state it was! So amazing that it even got me started on two technical papers of mine which I am currently authoring!

God, I am so missing my time back in Poland now. I am kind of ashamed too. Thinking of going back to Poland on the Indian independence day?! That is not something a patriot must ideally think of. But what can I do? These two months changed my life. It changed my total perception of working in a research field. I learned a lot technically, met new people, learnt about new cultures from all across the globe, saw new places created memories to be cherished forever. Life shall go on, new projects, new internships, new paths to follow but summer 2012 will always hold a special place in my heart and mind.

Signing off..

Stranded

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 13:09:25 -0400

It wasn’t even a week ago when I was about to leave Krakow when this real adventure occurred. 10:35 AM - Krakow to Frankfurt. 01:25 PM - Frankfurt to Mumbai. It was the perfect itinerary. One hour in Germany and then to home! The fastest way to Mumbai. And then came that damned announcement.

Delayed by 30 minutes. Shit. Anyways, I asked the staff. It seems it was pretty cool. I wouldn’t really miss the flight from Frankfurt. I was soo relieved. But not for long. Flight delayed by three hours. Damn. It was time to change the ticket. They booked me for a flight to Kuwait and then to Mumbai twenty after I reach Frankfurt on the delayed flight. That was quite good too! I would reach home early in the morning rather than midnight, when everybody was awake. But the adventure wasn’t over yet. Finally, the most feared thing happened. Flight cancelled.

It took me fifty minutes to reach the desk to ask the staff what I was supposed to do now. The flight to Kuwait was boarding in Frankfurt. That option was gone. They checked a flight ticket to Munich in the evening and then to Frankfurt and then to Mumbai from there. Damn. Anyways, I was reaching home the earliest possible way I could! But wonder of wonders! The Munich flight got cancelled too!

Now, all that I had to do was get my backs from the conveyor belts, and then go to the ticket counter to get my tickets changed. It wasn’t surprising for me to see that huge line when I reached the counter. 3 hours to reach the ticket counter. It was soo tiring! And then came the shocker! The next flight out of Krakow was in the morning the next day. To Munich. And then I had to run to catch the flight from Munich to Mumbai! Damn, it seemed bad.

But Lufthansa was really cool! They got me accommodation in a 5 star hotel in Krakow. Free cab, free food, free mini-bar (!) and a 100 PLN (1600 INR) voucher for the duty free! The deal seemed good! And the stay at the hotel wasn’t bad either. I watched the Poland vs. Italy volleyball match (Olympics 2012) on the big screen at the hotel gardens! Plus, it was really cool for me because I was wearing a bright red POLSKA! t-shirt. It was real fun meeting people who told me how great a supporter I am! :P

All that aside, the night (my last in Krakow) was really amazing. Good sleep, prompt cab service…and I was there on time at the Krakow airport for my flight to Munich. And then to Mumbai. I reached home 24 hours late. But all was good. I was home.

Well, as of now, I do not really know why I suddenly thought of typing this post out, but well, that was my story. One helluva adventure!

Signing off…

Taken with Instagram

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 12:14:58 -0400

Taken with Instagram

Sick of typing now (Taken with Instagram)

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 12:14:31 -0400

Sick of typing now (Taken with Instagram)

Stranded for a day. But flying finally :p (Taken with Instagram)

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 12:14:05 -0400

Stranded for a day. But flying finally :p (Taken with Instagram)

Taken with Instagram

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 12:13:33 -0400

Taken with Instagram

ManipalBlog logo ;) seen in Poland (Taken with Instagram)

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 12:11:55 -0400

ManipalBlog logo ;) seen in Poland (Taken with Instagram)

Working (Taken with Instagram)

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 12:11:13 -0400

Working (Taken with Instagram)

Real nice flash drive. Thanks AGH! (Taken with Instagram)

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 12:10:45 -0400

Real nice flash drive. Thanks AGH! (Taken with Instagram)

At work (Taken with Instagram)

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 12:05:22 -0400

At work (Taken with Instagram)

Tired after a long trek (Taken with Instagram)

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 12:04:23 -0400

Tired after a long trek (Taken with Instagram)