A Student's Perspective - Robotics

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Summer Student Internships

My name is Gisselle Cunningham; I am from Polytechnic Institute in New York University. It's located in Brooklyn, New York.

I am part of the MEI group, which stands for minority education and initiative program. 

I work in the section 347, the robotics mobility program and the lab that I do work in is the CLARaty software development lab.

I'm currently interning with my mentor, Richard Petris and Dr. Tara Estlin.
What they wanted was to be able to plot rover trajectories like in a visual presentation format. And the best way they thought would be is to go through Google Earth.

Why is this important? You can use this program to make your analysis of anything that has coordinate-sensitive information.

For instance, you can determine where the rover went.

Was its trajectory predictable? Was it precise?

Obviously, it's good for visual representation.

If you want to use this in meetings that you're having to see how your progress is going or to show the public what you've accomplished so far.

At school, I'm into robotics, I'm studying computer engineering,which is half computer science engineering and half electrical engineering. 

So if you take the two of them together, the programming with the hardware and software, in a way, you kind of get a robot.

I want to work with prosthetics, robotic prosthetics, with people who are missing limbs and things like that. Even get more in depth with nanotechnology and medicine delivery.

Having JPL on my resume I think for me is a huge, huge deal.

It's a great, very great environment.

You have all your resources here available to you. 

The people, they're very friendly. They want to help you if you need help with anything. It's a place where your ideas are welcome.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology