Research & engineering apprenticeship program (REAP)

Abstract

We received a grant for the Research & Engineering Apprenticeship Program (REAP) which is Army Educational Outreach Program (AEOP) effort which provides high school students, especially those from underserved and underrepresented populations, a summer apprenticeship opportunity. Student apprentices received an educational stipend of $1500 and were required to conduct research at a minimum of 200 hours for 6-8 weeks during the summer. This hands-on research experience was intended to develop student understanding of the process of research and to create interest in the Department of Defense (DOD) and Science, Technology, Engineering or Mathematics (STEM) careers. Two high school students were selected based on their High School GPA, SAT/ACT scores and interest. The two REAP students were first introduced to control a Parrot Quad-Copter Drone with the Scratch software developed by MIT. The Scratch software gave students the capability to create simple programs by visually combining blocks on the display with one another. Building on the experience the student gained from working with Scratch, the students were introduced to the fundamental concepts of how to use ROS (Robot Operating System). The use of this system is ordinarily taught at the senior college level, however, by simplifying the concepts down to its fundamentals the students of the REAP program were able to grasp the basics of how to use ROS. This paper will describe how the students were able to use ROS in Linux environment to program a drone to take off and land on its own, based on a script they wrote in Python programming language. Also, this paper will discuss how the students used the concept of computer vision systems to track objects of a certain color.