Welcome to my online notebook - a collection of notes, project updates, and other posts viewable by category. My name is Sean Fish, a student at Georgia Tech studying computer science. For more information about me, read my About page.
Notes: Explanation Types and Strategies
Explanation Types According to Tania Lombrozo in Explanation and Abductive Inference, there are three main types of explanation: mechanistic, functional / teleological, and formal. Lombrozo uses tires to demonstrate the three explanatory appeals. I will adapt this demonstration, but with a wooden wheel made from a solid panel. Consider the following situation: Alice has a large crate of apples in Atlanta, and wants to deliver this crate to Bob in Barnesville....
Spring 2022 Projects
Marine Robotics Group At the moment, I am leading two electrical projects in the Marine Robotics Group. The first project is the Nova Motor, a modified Newport Vessels trolling motor which is being controlled with a PWM module that interfaces with a Pi Pico for use with micro-ROS. The second project is the ORCS Comms system, an OrangeRX-based communication system with a failsafe E-stop. I am looking forward to leveraging skills I gained in PCB design and electrical work while working on a prototype DAQ system for the Yellow Jacket Space Program....
Crosspost: Towards Easier ROS Setup & Collaboration
Check out my write-up over here.
2021 RoboBoat Auxiliary Test Vehicle
For the RoboBoat 2021 competition, our team was essentially completely virtual. However, we tried our best to make the most of it. During this project, I experimented with two things: Liquid rubber as a waterproof coating for a foamboard hull Bilge pump motors The foamboard hull was rather limited in displacement, but it got the job done. The liquid rubber held up for the most part, but it did not adhere well to packing tape and would peel easily on the sharp folded corners of the foamboard hull....
2012 Hasbro R2-D2 Dome Controller
In late high school, I decided to disassemble my old toy R2-D2 with the intent of making an even better robot. That robot is still a work in progress, and I’ve learned a lot since then. In the meantime, I have at least figured out how to control the planetary gear system that allows the dome to rotate. It utilizes a quadrature encoder incorporating two pairs of infrared blasters and sensors....
Notes: Symbolic Chat Systems
Symbolic methods Personally, I think GOFAI gets an undue amount of neglect and hate these days. Video games use them, and they can be fairly effective at simulating reasonable intelligent behavior. Not to say there isn’t any use with recent techniques, but symbolic systems are just more easily deciphered. Well, at least when they don’t explode in complexity, like FSMs do. Additionally, humans do use symbols, is it so wrong to think that we can use neural and symbolic methods together?...
ROS on Fedora Silverblue
I’ve run Gazebo on WSL2 before, albeit sluggishly. One difference between Docker and Podman is apparently the way networks are handled. podman run -it -e DISPLAY --rm --net=host osrf/ros:melodic-desktop-full bash podman run --rm -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix -v /dev/dri:/dev/dri --security-opt=label=type:container_runtime_t -e DISPLAY localhost/xonotic-container xonotic-glx podman run --rm -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix -v /dev/dri:/dev/dri --security-opt=label=type:container_runtime_t -e DISPLAY osrf/ros:melodic-desktop-full bash