Intro Day

I had my first day yesterday, or my intro day, rather.  I showed up at 2:30 for what I thought was a meeting, and was quickly handed off to a grad student to give me a tour of the facilities, because the professor in charge of the lab had to go listen to the proposal for what was going to be done in the coming months.  So I saw all the different kind of robots, which you can see on their website if you want (http://www.takanishi.mech.waseda.ac.jp/top/index.htm), and got a brief presentation by someone in the lab.  Everything was in Japanese, but fore the most part, except some technical jargon, I was able to understand, which felt good.  Then, after a few hours of touring, I went back and caught the end of the meeting, which was much harder to understand, because the students were being extra polite and using lots of big words, again, all in Japanese.
    At the end of the day, though, when I asked what I would be doing, the professor didn't tell me I'd be working on a little, relatively unimportant task befitting an intern.  He asked me which labs I found interesting, and I said the bipedal robots and the one working with this sensor jacket (WB-3).  And then I said I wanted to work in whatever I'd be most helpful to the lab.  So now, I'm working in the bipedal robot lab, on this guy (http://www.takanishi.mech.waseda.ac.jp/top/research/wabian/index_j.htm), trying to incorporate the sensors on the jacket into him so they can measure his bio-mechanics (gait and whatnot) compared to those of a human.
    Quick blurb on Wabian, the robot I'll be helping with, turns out that the reason it's so special/different (better?) than other bipedal robots like ASIMO (a well-known robot built by Honda) is that Wabian has a fully functional pelvis,and so is a much more accurate representation of human structure, gait, and capability.  By having a pelvis, the robot looks much more human in it's movements (albeit, still robotic).  The purpose of the Wabian structure is for human-robot interactions.  There's another robot I might help with as well, called Kobian, which is the Wabian body, with an expressive face, and that's one more step in human-robot interactions.  Anyway, starting next week I should have better details as to what I'll be doing, but most likely it will be various smaller tasks that will help the more permanent students with their tasks.  I think this will be good, because it will allow me to get practice in a bunch of various skill sets, as opposed to getting a lot of experience in just one area.