Student Yinghan JIN's Research Experience in UC Berkeley

Student Yinghan Jin went to University of California, Berkeley for three-month research in a laboratory. She wrote about this memorable experience after she came back to ZJU.  

UC Berkeley Campus

On 5th October 2018, I started to work in Mechanical System Control Lab (MSC for short), at Department of Mechanical Engineering in UC Berkeley. This Lab focuses on designing and developing control strategies for mechanical systems. A group of PhD and master students were working in the lab on autonomous driving.

Free shuttle bus to the lab

One week later after I settled, I joined the research work with another visiting PhD student, and he gave me a lot of advice on my research. My research topic was high definition map construction and vehicle detection. Three months later, I completed my work and gave a presentation. I completed the construction of high-precision maps and 3D buildings models in several areas of San Francisco, USA. Moreover, I trained a neural network based on Faster-RCNN and successfully extracted vehicle oriented bounding box (OBB) from video, and then formed trajectory information, which was of great significance to the study of vehicle behavior trajectory in autonomous driving.  

Recently, I wrote my research work in two papers as the fourth author and submitted the papers to IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).

Yinghan at the university gate

I was lucky to make acquaintance with so many excellent people in UC Berkeley, PhD students from Xi'an Jiaotong University, Beijing University of Technology, and UC Berkeley. My two roommates at UC Berkeley are from Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Tsinghua University. Every time I talked to them, I learned. Not only study and research skills, but also knowledge about life, nature and society. They are very kind to me and gave me advice on how to work more efficiently, how to deal with problems encountered in research. It was a good opportunity to improve myself.  

Thanks giving party in professor’s house

Every experience is worthwhile, as Steve Jobs said, you cannot connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. Looking back, what I did in the past enabled me to be admitted as a visiting student in UC Berkeley, and I also look forward to seeing what would be connected after this research experience.