Yesterday I recieved the news that I my GSOC’22 project proposal got accepted. I applied for the Robocomp organization for the project titled “Model Predictive Control for obstacle avoidance”. Since for the next few months I will be working on implementing my proposal I figured it will be best to keep track of how I progressed. It might be helpful for future GSOC applicants.
Pre-application period
I decided to apply for the project “Model Predictive Control for obstacle avoidance” under the organization Robocomp on 08 April, 2022. The reason I decided to apply under this project was because I am currently working on Model Predictive Controls for autonomous vehicles as a part of my master’s thesis and I figured it will be a good learning experience as the project is in the same domain as my master’s work.
After making the decision, the first thing I did was to email the project mentors regarding my interest in working on that project. I shared some of my existing work on MPC with them. They got back to me the next day and asked me to setup the Robocomp repository and the optimizer component. The readme of the optimizer component was very confusing for me. I had to contact the mentors multiple times for them to clear things out for me. After a few days of trial and error I was finally able to set things up properly. I decided to make my first contribution by improving the README of the optimizer component so I created my first pull request and it was accepted the next day.
Now comes the part to write my proposal. I found a few examples through a quick google search. I wrote a rough draft and shared it with the project mentors asking for their suggestions on how I can improve my proposal. They mentioned a few things and after modifying the proposal accordingly I finally made my submission on 19th April, 2022.
In the proposal I mentioned that I will be implementing the paper [An NMPC Approach using Convex Inner Approximations for Online Motion Planning with Guaranteed Collision Avoidance] . This involves understanding a lot of math to implement it properly. I spent the time from 19th April to 20th April understanding this.
On 20th March, 2022, the selected proposals were announced. While I was delighted to see that my proposal got accepted, I also felt nervous. Getting my proposal accepted was only the first step. Now comes the real work. My standard imposter syndrome hit me but after a bit of positive self-talk and support from my friends I am ready to face the challenge head on.
The next step is to email my mentors and discuss how to approach the project along with meeting schedules, coding conventions and docmentation styles.