In this edition of “Do you know your VEX Program Alumni?” we interviewed Daniel Geschwender, a founding member of Omaha North High school robotics team 1064A along with previous VEX Alumni interview subject Walter Bircher. Daniel is currently a first-year Ph.D. student at University of Nebraska-Lincoln conducting research in the area of Constraint Processing. REC FOUNDATION: How did you get started competing in robotics? DANIEL GESCHWENDER: I was taking an engineering class my sophomore year of high school. Our teacher told the students about an upcoming robotics event and encouraged us to attend and spectate. The students and teachers were all really impressed by the competition so we worked to get our own club started. That first year was kind of a trial run, but everyone thought it was great. We got more funding for equipment and started getting serious the next year. REC FOUNDATION: Youre currently a grad student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Can you tell us about your research? DANIEL GESCHWENDER: I am doing research in the area of Constraint Processing, which is a sub-field of Artificial Intelligence. Constraint Processing is all about solving really difficult combinatorial problems such as scheduling thousands of airplanes or allocating resources optimally throughout a factory. There are lots of algorithms and techniques to tackle such problems. My research is specifically focusing on automatic selection of the best algorithm for a given problem. REC FOUNDATION: Did your experience with competitive robotics help prepare you for your work? If so, how? DANIEL GESCHWENDER: I think they definitely did, though indirectly. I dont currently work with robots. However, I still actively code, something that I got a lot of practice with through the competitions. I also think that competitive robotics was good preparation for a research environment. REC FOUNDATION: What were some of the highlights of your experience with VEX Robotics Competition? DANIEL GESCHWENDER: I really looked forward to the announcement of the new competition each year. For me, one of the best parts was brainstorming potential strategies with my teammates and prototyping these ideas. The autonomous competition was my favorite part of the actual event as I did much of the work on the coding of the robot. REC FOUNDATION: As a founding member of your former team, what advice do you have for students trying to start a robotics program? DANIEL GESCHWENDER: First of all, I would suggest searching for information online. Theres lots of competition videos and web forums discussing the topic. From there, it is certainly worthwhile to spectate at an event. Youll get a chance to see how things work in person and hopefully interact with some of the teams there.
Posted on: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 00:08:24 +0000
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