For Gentry, the project was made to order, because it involved solving the same sorts of problems she dealt with in her swing dance analyses, namely, where the robot is in space at any given time.
When she arrived on the scene, AUTOGEN was already in existence, but it relied on the positioning of the robot and the piece to be welded in a fixed configuration. “I asked, ‘Why don’t we ask if there is a better place to put the robot and the piece in relation to each other?’” says Gentry. In response, she created an optimization routine to move the robot, or the parts, “to allow the robot to reach more of those weird corners,” she explains.
 Original default position of robot welder |
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 Improved position of robot welder (enhances manueverability and results in more weld lines being reachable by the robotic arm). |
Ordinarily, doing so would require inordinately large calculations. To get around this problem Gentry made some generalizations. “I abbreviated the search for ways to weld the piece by estimating how well the robot would be able to reach into hard-to-get-at crevices, instead of doing a full planning procedure. That resulted in some really neat improvements,” she says.
Her Sandia practicum advisor, Arlo Ames, puts it in bolder terms. “She produced, more rapidly than I’ve ever seen, an answer that is a very significant piece of the overall product,” he says. “AUTOGEN is a big, difficult thing. I suggested to her where to look, and she jumped in. The next thing I knew, she had code up and functional. It’s working, it’s very fast, very efficient, and does the right thing. The code she wrote is essentially going verbatim into AUTOGEN.”
The PHANTOM Returns
Unbeknownst to Ames, a PHANTOM was delivered to a different department at Sandia while Gentry was working on AUTOGEN. She got wind of the fact and was delighted to have the opportunity to help set it up. “I jumped on the box as soon as it arrived and started running some more of my swing dance experiments,” she says. Though Gentry makes it sound easy, setting up the PHANTOM requires know-how that Sandia was considering obtaining through an outside source. Instead, “just because Sommer was there, had prior experience, and is of a natural inclination to jump in and help out,” the lab saved a considerable amount of money, says Ames. In fact, he says he was not even aware of Gentry’s extracurricular efforts with the PHANTOM “until it was half done and people were excited,” he says.
The feelings about Gentry’s practicum experience are mutual. “I spent three months at ISRC. I had a wonderful time, and it gave me the opportunity to explore robotics more fully,” she comments.
For his part, working with Gentry gave Ames renewed hope. “In recent years I’ve fallen off a lot on mentoring students because I am tired of the effort. I’ve gotten rather cynical about things, and the amount of my time required to get somebody up to speed was getting to the point where I was less and less willing to even try. With Sommer I have renewed enthusiasm that I can get something meaningful done with this kind of temporary workforce.”
“Working with Sommer was a genuine pleasure,” he adds. “I can’t imagine a better working relationship; she came, she saw, she did. If I could hire her I would, but she frankly has places she’s going and things she’s doing.”
