Week 5: Vine Robots, Ducts, and The Great Outdoors!

By Daniel Chan

So much has happened in the last week! Last Monday (July 30th), Margaret arrived with the vine robot. It's a really interesting robot which is totally unique in its way of moving by growing, and Margaret and her colleagues developed a really cool way of attaching a camera to the front of it as it grows. If you're interested in learning more about the vine robot in general, Stanford made a really cool video showing it off here! (Stanford researchers develop vine-like, growing robot) Margaret spent a good portion of the week getting it ready with its new and more durable fabric skin, and we did a few tests at the end of the week! She spent Monday making some changes based on what we found, and we're hopeful that today we will be able to explore in areas past where our robot has been in the past. Everyone at the site is fascinated by the vine robot, and we did a joint talk this past Tuesday night to all of the Peruvian archeologists on our respective robots as well as the more general applications of robotics in archeology. We did it nearly entirely in Spanish, which was really great for our Spanish knowledge! Around 40 people showed up, from the Stanford archeology team, the Peruvian archeologists, and even the directors of the site, museum, and research institute were there.

Some unfortunate news we received this week is that the Global Engineering Program which we are funded through was recently canceled for future years, so unless something changes or funding can be found elsewhere, we may be the last group of engineers to come to Chavin. We've had an amazing experience in the program, and are working with John to create something to help show that the program is really effective, both for learning and archeological discovery. We hope he can find funding for future years!

One of our main focuses this week has simply been to explore anywhere and everywhere we can. We've been sending our robot down every duct we can find, taking video of the surroundings to see what we can find. Our hope was to find an undiscovered gallery in or under one of the buildings, but so far, we haven't found anything along those lines. One highlight was that our robot was able to make it down a 100 foot duct and we found out that two known galleries were connected by this duct! This wasn't on the map, and John didn't seem to know it previously, so it felt like a big win. Many other ducts are collapsed within 30 feet, and we haven't seen anything particularly new or exciting, but we hope that this knowledge of what is in the ducts will be helpful to future archeologists, even if we don't have a groundbreaking discovery.

We're also working on documentation and finishing up our work on the robot so that people in the future can understand and (hopefully) continue development on it. For those interested, we hope to publish our findings and make the whole project transparent and open source, both for future use in Chavin as well as potentially in other archeological sites.

In non-robot news, we've had a lot of time outdoors! Two weeks ago, Daniel went to Huaraz to eat a lot of food, and did a day hike to the beautiful Laguna 69, where it was snowing!

Last week, Margaret and I went on a spontaneous trip to camp on Shayapa, the one of the hills that forms the valley we are in. We had a really fun photo shoot of Margaret with the city lights below! This past weekend Jack and I were able to go with Margaret, Liz, and Alessandra on a backpacking expedition to Carhuascancha, where we hiked a total of ~18 miles over two days through a beautiful valley, and camped overnight. Because we don't have a camp stove we were limited to precooked food, so we boiled 30 sweet potatoes and 17 eggs, which lasted us all 4 meals with some sweet potatoes to spare. When we got back to our packs after an excursion Sunday morning, we found a cute puppy sleeping near our bags. After we fed it a sweet potato, it followed us on our hike for 4+ miles, until we came across its owners, a herding family. They told us his name, ironically, is Gringo because of its light fur. Last mini story is that Liz and I got haircuts! We paid less than 3 dollars each, and I got a more extreme haircut than I asked for, but I look a little like a Peruvian soccer player now!

This week, we're planning to continue documentation, exploring the rest of the ducts we can, supporting Margaret's vine robot, and making a few final improvements to the code. Thanks again to everyone who has been following along and supporting us!