- February 16, 2022
"I would only recommend an internship at JAXA for people who are comfortable being extremely self-directed. The internship experience at JAXA (though it may vary from lab to lab) seems to usually consist of a lot of freedom and very little guidance. This can be a good thing, but it can also be a little overwhelming."
This summer I was working on an internship in robotics in the Kubota Lab at JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) / ISAS (Institute of Space and Astronautical Science). My role in the project was designing and implementing a stereo vision system to reconstruct the surrounding environment in the form of a 3D point cloud, meant for a hopping robot with a single light source in a dark planetary cave. I selected the stereo camera, implemented code to take depth information from the camera as it moved around the “cave” and transform it into a point cloud, and tested this reconstruction process in a simulated cave environment with different lighting conditions. Through completing these tasks, I gained knowledge about how stereo vision works and the 3D reconstruction process, as well as a general understanding of the kind of work that goes on at a place like JAXA.