This summer, Lu Yiwei, a student from SSE, will embark on a different research journey in the United States as she has been selected for this year's RISS (Robotics Institute Summer Scholars) programme at the prestigious School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), one of the Top 30 universities in the United States, for research on Social Behavior Planning. RISS is a top summer scholarship programme offered by the School of Computer Science open to international undergraduate students each year and only about 35 people are eligible for inclusion.

The Robotics Institute Summer Scholars (RISS) Program is an intensive summer research program for talented undergraduate students. Summer Scholars have the opportunity to participate in state-of-the-art research projects, interact with a diverse research team, and to be mentored by leading faculty and technical staff. The program introduces aspiring students to dynamic research resources and methods, RI graduate education programs and research projects. The Summer Scholars program lasts 11 weeks. It begins June 1st and runs through the end of the second week of August. Only scholars who are available for the entirety of that time will be considered.

Lv at the robot lab

Lv found her interest in robot research in the summer before the Sophomore Year when she joined the Engineering Laboratory of Robot and Intelligent Manufacturing of the University. “I was a little confused from the beginning, and later I slowly discovered that researching robots can bring great fun to myself.” During that summer, Lv gained professional knowledge in the laboratory and learned to be highly focused. During the cooperation, she learned a lot from the seniors and gained valuable friendship there.

Lv Yiwei and teammates from Yao Class of Tsinghua University to study the automatic driving of sailing boats

On January 23-26, 2018, the SSE of CUHK-Shenzhen and the Yao Class of Tsinghua University held an academic exchange programme. As a student representative of SSE, Lv teamed up with students from the Yao Class and completed a mini research project.

The report of the UPSIDE-DOWN team of Lv and her teammates

She said: "My experimental team is called UPSIDE-DOWN. This is to remind myself not to connect the wrong positive and negative poles of the power supply. In the course of the competition, we have met a lot of unexpected situations and even stayed up till 4 o'clock in the morning to test the equipment and procedures. But everyone still persisted and successfully completed the project.” In the competition, the UPSIDE-DOWN team not only completed all the established tasks, but also combined artificial intelligence (AI) to realize the automatic driving of the sailboat, simulating the scene of the game, and carrying out several rounds of man-machine competition with the hybrid sailing boat. In the end, the UPSIDE-DOWN team won the championship with their wind-driven sailing boat project and received the Best Team Award.