I opened an Instagram account to document my work with the robot, because there is so much mechanics and dirty work and painful engineering done, which will never be acknowledged in any future paper I might publish.
For now it looks like I am doing well, since instead of dick pics from followers, I get LinkedIn requests :)

On days like this I am very happy I chose to be an engineer and not tried my luck at being an Instagram influencer. I'm also quite relieved I don't work at Facebook or any of its metastases.

I nearly beheaded my colleague because he left dirty coffee cups and an open biscuit package in our robotics lab, where we shouldn't even bring food to begin with, let alone leave it to rot.
To make things worst, we had a surprise visit of people from another department, who spent 1 hour looking for the Allen wrench that was hiding under the biscuit package....

Sometimes I see rants about issues that are somewhat in my domain, and I think about replying something that might be useful. But then I check other rants by those users, and there is a bunch of weird slang that requires me to turn to Urban Dictionary, mixed with overwhelming amount of edginess and paranoia, and I'm like - no, I'll pass on that one.

I want to thank the Dell support guy who explained to me that I purchased an Alienware (no shit, I guess this explains how 3000$ disappeared from my bank account!).
Then he proceeded to explain to me that 1.5 hours battery life, for a 86Wh battery, when the only usage is browsing, is completely normal!
My dude, this bullshit ain't gonna fly with me.

My code review nightmare is reviewing C++ code that was written by Matlab people. Letting them commit code without reviewing it will surely bring Armageddon, but having to watch these horrors...
Functions signature like 'void func(int arr[3])'. Nononononono.

My banker is from Kenya and every time I see him we completely drift off finance and talk at length on education, specifically technical education.
I have some experience teaching in high school, and when he said they could really use people like me in Kenya, it resonated.
I would like to go back to the industry once I'm done with the PhD, but I don't think about the industry as endgame.
I'd like to eventually be an educator, or someone who contributes to educational programs and processes.

So, my lab mate tried to mansplain to me that Python is faster than C/C++.
It took all my self control not to smack him in the face with a chair.
Using Numba means it's no longer interpreted as Python, so it doesn't count.

Apparently the German word for doing agonizing IT work is PhD.

So I managed to correctly project a bounding box in an image through like 3 coordinate systems until I transformed it to an angular aperture in the base frame. So now I can detect people in the rgb camera and then block the lidar readings corresponding to the people when I run my localization algo :)

So today I worked with a drill (and actually managed to do what I intended). Where do I collect my trophy and "alpha male" certificate?
This is as far from software as I ever strayed...

My anxiety levels skyrocket when my hypothesis is actually verified in experiments. It gives me that haunting feeling of "I must have done something wrong at some point."

The frequency in which I see women-hating comments in certain tech FB groups is alarmingly high lately. Even posts about ordering food are somehow twisted into really awful discussions (raping women, locking them at home, stoning cheating wives...).
Maybe I'm just a sensitive "female", but I honestly wouldn't want to work with a person who has this mindset.

Something with cats.

My research proposal was rejected :(

My self-esteem increased. It was the first time I felt truly good at something.

In the last few days I've been collecting data for our lidar-based people detector, and it made me wonder if foot fetish is also extended to lidar scans 😂

Just ordered a new (well, not the newest) Alienware laptop. I know it doesn't really justify the price, but I'm such a fan-girl.....

My paper got accepted to a good journal, and I was asked to send my bio and a picture. The post-doc in charge said the picture was unsuitable in a very condescending manner, without explaining what is the problem.
I asked my (ex-)advisor what is wrong with it, and he said my clothes and the settings are fine, but my expression is "judgmental, angry and will make the readers uncomfortable".
Imagine it's 2021, and girls in academia still need to deal with that shit of "why aren't you smiling?"

When my poor spatial skills and extremely random associations meet.
Colleague: How big is the sensor?
Me: Well, it's...ugh..about this...hmmm, bigger than the other one, but like...I don't know, like a small bible?

I kind of feel like I invested 2.5 years of my life trying to run away from being a hamster, and here I am in my PhD back in the hamster spot.
The moment I finish compiling some not-os-compatible package, I get a new one to tame. A day after perfecting a sensor integration, another sensor is thrown at me. I am the one who calibrate and tunes the MoCap system, including manufacturing the markers and ordering part. I make sure the robot is functional, from software to battery replacement.
I need to crawl on floors to collect data, while the rest of the lab uses public datasets.
I optimize C++ code, and then get asked to write unit tests and use a CI, while the rest of the lab just writes some subpar Python.
They are doing research and I am doing Cinderella work.
I shouldn't be punished because I get shit done, whether it 3D modeling, CMake voodoo or low-level programming.
Instead of encouraging other lab mates to develop skills, everything is thrown at me. Fuck that shit.

I reached the bottom of the barrel baby-talking to a robot 😂
The localization demo worked out of the box, in a very disturbingly suspicious way.

https://youtube.com/watch/...

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 :)

So I integrated the second Lidar, and did a small quantitative evaluation - the localization succeeded in 133 out of 135 scenarios.
The next step is to tentatively port all my python code to C++. So I started this today, and while I always hate on Python and say I like C++, porting all this code looks so damn painful....

Easy - an actress. My drama queen skills are out of this world, and I am a master emotional manipulator.
I was accepted to acting school but my mom put a veto on it, and said first I need to get a real profession and then I can make stupid choices.
But after my engineering degree and army service I was too old for sucking cock in LA.
So here I am doing my robotics PhD. Feel sorry for my lab mates having to take my melodramatic shit on the daily.

While working on my localization algorithm, I also set up a baseline I can compare my results to. I chose AMCL which is the go-to localization package everyone uses in ROS.
I took a peek at their code and found this atrocity - "ad hoc weighting scheme" where probabilities that are not mutually exclusive are added together, and also taken to the power of 3 because why the hell not!

First results from my work on the YouBot - Localization based on lidar and wheel encoders. My algo is still over-confident, and I need to improve it. But just getting all this shit to work together in ROS was so hard...
For now it's in Python, but when I am sure of its correctness I re-write it in C++ and ROS2-compatible

https://youtube.com/watch/...

We got a list of new candidates for PhD positions in the lab. There are a lot of people from the Middle East, and it made me wonder if there might be an issue with me being an Israeli.

So if there are engineers here from the Middle East, and Muslim countries in general, would you see an issue with working with an Israeli?

I guess schools in DE are very safe, because this kind of behavior is normally punched out of you around 4th grade.
Just close the fucking window and shut the fuck up instead of snitching in a chat where the boss can see. And why the fuck was that guy in the lab on Sunday?
BTW, there is no chance anyone could pull our 75+kg robots out of that window. Not to mention they are like 20 years old and their only worth is as scraps.

So I made an ancient robot work with ROS2, and revived the motion capture system so I can collect (and sync) Lidar scans, odometry and GT pose. But the worse is ahead of me...