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INTERNSHIP

My Career Exploration and Internship Reports

Career Exploration Report

This career exploration report documents the exploration of two possible career fields and finding four possible internship sites related to those fields. In depth and detailed research was done on both career fields: Mechanical and Mechatronics engineering. Many government, informational, educational, and job description sites were used, including the US Department of Labor Statistics, HowToBecome.org and Indeed.com. This research led from information about our careers into locating four internship sites. Of these, the chosen internship was the Wright Scholar because it gives the opportunity to gain experience working in several different fields at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. Next steps would be to wait for an answer from the Wright Scholar Internship program and to conduct research on potential college programs.

2021 Summer Internship

This Intership log documents my internship experience as a Wright Scholar at the Air Force Research Laboratory Gaming Research Integration for Learning Laboratory during the summer of 2021.

Entry 1: 6/11/2021, 9 hours, 38 hours total

Earlier this week, we started an introduction to the GRILL and working in Unreal Engine by creating mini games. My mini game was a 3D recreation of the popular game snake. Today I put the finishing touches on the game, getting the tail of the snake to spawn properly, and a working leaderboard that saves. The game controls pretty well, and I even added a difficulty slider to make it more accessible to different players.
Concrete meets bricks
Concrete meets bricks

Entry 2: 6/15/2021, 9 hours, 58 hours total

Today, I worked on figuring out what object recognition software we want to use. The first option I looked at was Vuforia. Vuforia features direct integration with both unity and the HoloLens, making it very easy to integrate. The second option I looked at was Wikitude. Wikitude featured some HoloLens integration; however, it was not at the level of Vuforia, and it also costs several thousands of dollars. Finally, I looked at OpenCV, which is very powerful, however it does not have as much integration with the HoloLens. In the end, we chose Vuforia because it is free and easy to use.

Entry 3: 6/16/2021, 9 hours, 67 hours total

Today, I used Fusion 360 to create a reconstruction of the pallet jack based of the STL file we found online. The STL file was all one body, but for the purpose of our project, we want to be able to move individual parts by themselves. To do this, I recreated the pallet jack in Fusion 360 and made each part of the pallet jack an individual component. I then exported the file as an OBJ file since it can contain multiple individual bodies. This will make it easier to animate the model.
Concrete meets bricks
Concrete meets bricks

Entry 4: 6/23/2021, 9 hours, 94 hours total

Today, I worked on integrating the Vuforia program with the User Interface. This was actually a quite simple process, as calling one method would pull up the UI. This is an important step in terms of the program.

Entry 5: 6/25/2021, 8 hours, 112 hours total

The internet has been out since yesterday. We don’t know what’s happening, but we can’t work on anything because it’s all online. I had a two-hour lunch and I went all the way to Fairborn. We tried to see how far we could get in the dinosaur game on google, and I got second place. We also played monopoly, and I won, but only because we didn’t fully understand the rules. The internet came back in the last hour, but we had a lecture about magnets to go to, so we didn’t get to work on our projects.
Concrete meets bricks
Concrete meets bricks

Entry 6: 6/28/2021, 9 hours, 121 hours total

Today, I worked on trying to get the model to line up in real life. I tried a variety of different methods of lining up, but I couldn’t get the model to show up. However, the menus pop up when it recognizes the pallet jack, meaning that for the user, they just have to walk up to the pallet jack and the menus will appear.

Entry 7: 6/29/2021, 9 hours, 130 hours total

Today, I worked on getting more alignment with vuforia. I tried even more methods of adding and subtracting transforms, but still couldn’t get it to work ideally. We then made a demo for our customer and tested it.
Concrete meets bricks
Concrete meets bricks

Entry 8: 7/2/2021, 8 hours, 147 hours total

Started testing the capabilities of Vuforia Model Targets in Unity. I used the Vuforia Model Target Creation Tool to create a model target of a Honda CRX. Unfortunately, Mike’s car was not there to test the model on. Fortunately for me, Vuforia has trouble identifying different car models, so the model target was able to recognize any car as a Honda CRX. I used a laptop with unity running on it, and a webcam to test it.

Entry 9: 7/6/2021, 9 hours, 156 hours total

Today, I tested the object alignment again, but it was not consistent. Sometimes it was on top, sometimes it was halfway across the room. I looked online for a solution, but the only thread with a similar problem is from 2018 and has no useful solution.
Concrete meets bricks
Concrete meets bricks

Entry 10: 7/21/2021, 9 hours, 238 hours total

I finally finished getting the model alignment to work. After about 10 revisions of the object alignment program, I finally found a satisfactory way to position the model. It uses a couple of transforms so you can tune in the position and get the alignment spot on. It’s not perfect, but it is by far the best version of the object alignment program. The project is in a close to finalized state, we just gotta clean up some stuff.

Internship Reflection Essay

During the summer of 2021, I completed an Internship at the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Gaming Research Integration for Learning Lab (GRILL) over the course of eight weeks through a program called Wright Scholar. The Wright Scholar program was created by the Air Force Research Laboratory to expose high school juniors and seniors to STEM fields. During my time there, we started off by spending one week working in Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine is a game engine which allowed us to learn the basics of creating interactive user applications. Our challenge the first week was to create a mini-game inside of unreal, so I chose to do a first-person version of the popular game, Snake. After this first week, we got split up into groups of 3 Wright Scholars and were assigned a project. My group was assigned a project from a local company, O’Neil and Associates to create an augmented reality application for maintenance personnel. We worked on this project for six weeks, and as the project progressed, I got to see its evolution from just a basic concept with a webcam on a computer screen, to a fully developed Microsoft HoloLens application.

The biggest and most important part of this project was getting object recognition working on a Microsoft HoloLens. The Microsoft HoloLens is an augmented reality headset developed by Microsoft that allows for a user to interact with the virtual world without any controllers and have a full field of view. To create applications for the HoloLens, we had to develop it in Unity Engine. Unity Engine is very similar to unreal, however features a key difference in terms of programming. While Unreal Engine can use visual programming along with C++, Unity only offers text-based programming with C#. For me, this was not an issue because I have had experience with Java, which is closely related to C#. By using Unity, it also expanded our options in terms of object recognition. Object recognition was a big part of this project because it allowed us not only to automatically scan an item that needs maintenance for the user, but also allows us to track it in 3D space and create an intuitive interface for the user. To do this, we looked at a variety of options. The first option I looked at was OpenCV, which is a very popular object recognition software, however it is very complicated and does not integrate with Unity very well. The second software I looked at was Vuforia, which not only was free, but had official support for both HoloLens and Unity. Finally, there was Wikitude, which was very similar to Vuforia in terms of features, however was very expensive. In the end, the choice was obvious and we chose Vuforia.

One of the biggest challenges I faced during my internship was getting our models to track accurately. Vuforia was very good at object detection, but there were some minor issues with object tracking. With the HoloLens, we experienced some issues of the model overlay not being able to overlay on top of the model. It would always be off to the side, or sometimes even across the room. This required a lot of tinkering and tweaking on my end. I tried all sorts of different localization techniques, and I had about 10 different overlay programs with different methods of overlaying the model. I spent multiple days scouring the internet trying to find potential solutions to this issue, and trying to implement them, but to no avail. Eventually, through my days of tinkering, I eventually got a suitable solution. Since the model was always off by the same amount, I just added an offset to it. This gave me control over where the overlay was relative to the model. This was very successful, and allowed the overlay to actually function and be on top of the actual model. Another issue we faced during our project was one that we were not expecting at all. In the final week of our project, it was time to prepare a presentation for our client. Everything was going well, except for one thing, getting a video of the prototype. Whenever we would run the program on the headset, it would work fine, but as soon as we tried and record it, it would never work. We theorized that this was because the recording software would take priority over the camera built into the HoloLens, hence causing object recognition to stop working. We fixed this by trying a very weird solution. We pulled up the preview window for the HoloLens in a web browser, and used a screen recording software to record it. This meant that our video quality was not the best, however it allowed for the object recognition to work and give our client a view of what was going on in the application itself.

In the end, I learned a lot during my internship at the GRILL. I learned about video game development, software development, object recognition software, and even presenting to a client. These are all valuable skills that I will be able to use in my future career, and will give me insight into different industries.

Mentor Evaluation

Here is an image of my evaluation form:

Concrete meets bricks

Quote of the day: “I lost the game" -Victor Nusekabel