Welcome to the NASA Langley Research Center! Two and a half weeks into the hot and humid summer in Hampton, Virginia. I've spent my time familiarizing myself with the area (limited by transportation, but taking every opportunity for exploration) and my work in Garry Quall's Automation Lab in building 1220. I'm working on a team of about nine students (grad and undergrad) from Western Kentucky, MIT, Minnesota, Virgina, and Virgina Tech. The goal for the summer: Set-up and demonstration of an indoor and outdoor automated multi-vehicle UAV environment...details and progress updates in future posts!


I will make note in this first post about the attitude of people who work at Langley. Everyone, from researchers and scientists to the cashier in the cafeteria, is friendly and approachable. I've been very pleased to be among great scientist and engineers who are willing to share friendly conversation. It seems that everyone, including myself, feels very fortunate to be at NASA contributing to space research and our nation's effort to understand the universe...one planet at a time!

Amanda (Western Kentucky University) and I work on programming an Arduino microcontroller to interface to the DC motors of an RC car. Goal: autonomous vehicle maneuvers given real-time GPS coordinates.