Seeing Everything, All At Once
This weekend, Janurary 23rd, was the PiWars Conference 2021 - a robotics conference aimed at aspiring roboticists of all ages and levels of skill that runs alongside their yearly PiWars robotics challenge. I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to present a 20 minute pre-recorded talk on some of the challenges I'd faced in the development of a visual SLAM system for the robot we had built for the 2020 competition. It was the first time that I'd really had a crack at putting together a long-form video on any technical subject, as I'm rather used to either performing quick, snappy, relatively well-rehersed talks or more ad-libbed long-form in-person presentations on specific subject matters. Despite this, I had a fantastic time putting together the video and quite enjoyed the luxuries of being able to assemble and use detailed diagrams - the time required to do so, however, was not quite as appealing.
The entire weekend was a fantastic success, and it was great to see so many positive things coming out of the entire PiWars community even during a global pandemic - if anything, I suspect the increased time at home has given some of them a chance to build even more great projects! I'm super stoked to watch this year's competition and to finally get to test our own robot out next year, and on top of this the weekend has left me feeling more envigorated and wanting to learn than ever!
See you on the internet!