Training the beast!
Hopefully I will submit my paper soon, and then I can share a video of the beast in action :)

So the battery of our YouBot died, and since it's deprecated we had to ask the EE department to manufacture one for us. When a member of my group asked them for the custom battery last year, it took them 5+ weeks to get it.
Today I went there, and threatened the engineer to cry daily outside his room until it's ready. He already ordered the parts and said I will have it assembled by Tuesday.
I am totally in love with the terrifying effect a crying female has over male engineers.

I hit a milestone in my PhD journey today. I wrote my advisor an "I'm so done with this shit" e-mail for the first time!

So my localization algorithm actually runs onboard my YouBot :)
My paper was basically torn apart by my professor, so I had to write some new classes and redo the whole experimental section. And all the other sections too. I resubmitted it to him after revisions, and the second iteration was way better - I'm really close to final paper level :)
I told my professor and postdoc that I will appreciate more support and positive feedback, because so far our communication was only very dry criticism. For me it's really devastating, because feeling like I constantly disappoint people just kills me on the inside.
It seems like they took it to heart, they have been nicer to me in the last few days :)

I've been getting hostile vibes for being Israeli from a German guy in the lab. Consistently, it's not the MENA people who take issue with it, but the "enlightened" left-wing westerns.
Haters gonna hate, but I finished porting my NMCL to c++ and it's x25 faster than the Python version. Hopefully, I can do a live demo on the robot next week :)