Hackathons + Humanoid Simulation + UAV Conference + Breakout

The three weeks since the last update have been really different/interesting for me. There are quite a lot of changes in how I approach things and my thinking. Also I think my productivity just increased (in the fields of robotics and AI).
For starters, I found a really good place to spend my time (to work on my projects) and have been going there after my classes every day, and as of now this has been pretty good for my journey. (Not for acads, as I am not able to allocate some time for that)

So First thing, my humanoid robot project is going pretty well, decent progress has been made on the model, all that's left is to run the v1 training script I have and see if it converges. Will probably do this after this update. (Constrained by matlab/simulink). I have my friends from the industry asking me to switch the platform to Isaac Sim/MuJoCo, but I've decided to stick to matlab and take this as a challenge.

Next Breakout, I was working on training an RL agent for Atari Breakout.. Well the problem statement isn't that hard since we have a lot of solutions already. But what makes this interesting for me is that I'm trying to build this from barebones, with no external help whatsoever. This should let me gain some really good intuition of what the researchers in the frontier did in 2013/14. Though I'm running into some serious time constraints as I'm practically left with no time for this right now.
Also I was going through some of my old repositories.. And I have some really interesting projects that are private and that I wish to continue work on.. So for now, I have a lot of projects to work on by the time I'm done with my school.

There is a UAV conference happening in my city next week, I was really excited for that. But I realized how spending my entire week working on stuff really exhausts me on the weekend and I am still considering whether to attend or not.

Hackathons, I haven't really been participating in hackathons much since I started working on robots/RL. But fortunately for me, a national level hackathon popped up right in my city, based on RL envs. And I took a shot and participated SOLO (I submitted an initial env I designed), and guess what? I qualified for the 48 hour offline finale. (well the acceptance rates weren't that bad, they said about 2000 teams were chosen out of 52000).

That's about it for this update. I'm sure that I might be missing a lot of stuff, but I'll try my best to update whatever comes to my mind when writing these updates.