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First day

It's the first laboratory session for CMSC 172, Robot Modeling and we are faced with a real world problem that needs a real world computational solution.

The problem is called the gross motion path-finding problem, and what it's all about is planning the route of a robot in 2 dimensional space, given the starting point, and solid obstacles in the defined space. It's like having a map of the city, and planning your route from one place to the other by avoiding obstacles (buildings, parked cars, passing trains, etc.) and getting the shortest path possible.

It's a machine problem which may be solved using C (which i prefer most) or Java which takes in the definition of the 2 dimensional space, the starting position of the "robot" and the target position of the "robot", and the definition of the solid obstacles in the two dimensional space.

I've heard a couple of approaches from sir Resty, and I'm stil scouring the web for possible hints as to how to be able to go about this systematically. But from what I've heard from Resty, I should be able to spew out some code as to try and solve the problem.

I have roughly two weeks to work on this, and I could possibly try and hack at it at home, when I get the laptop working like new again. I think I need to get a lot more RH packages because the RH 9 installer doesnt include Anjuta, Xine/mplayer, among other things.

So much for eye candy... Maybe that's why RH is the more popular linux distro (aside from the fact that they have a financial machine that does the marketing for them), but not the most hacker friendly one. And maybe that's why debian is still more or less reserved for the more hacker types (although apt does make you a little lazy, but then it also does allow you to concentrate on the things you want and need to do).

Ok, I'm now officially using institute resources for personal needs -- but in a slight way I am using the resources for academic purposes.

Chillin'...

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