Been busy with school so I'm combining 3 months into one blog update!

Horse Research

As part of my master’s program requirements, I have to complete a year-long research project, and somehow through luck, fate, or pure manifestation, I ended up with a topic involving horses: Learning Assistive Control for Horse Recovery from Anesthesia!! I genuinely tried to find a bird-related topic and even reached out to the Lab of O, but I guess they didn’t want my free labor…

Horses weigh roughly 500–600 kilograms, and standing up requires coordinating an enormous amount of force and balance in a very short time. After anesthesia, horses often try to stand before they’ve fully regained motor control, which makes recovery extremely dangerous. Despite a successful medical procedure, there’s still about a 1% fatality rate during recovery. To reduce this risk, the school’s veterinary department developed an auto-belay system that provides a constant 20-kilogram upward assist through a harness while the horse is standing up. However, further experimentation and testing on live horses is difficult and risky.

The goal of my project is to improve stability during the stand-up motion using reinforcement learning and simulation of the auto-belay system and the core research question is: How can we model a horse recovering from anesthesia, identify signals that predict stability, and improve the auto-belay controller based on those signals?

The past few months have been filled with reading research papers, reviewing hours of post-surgery horse videos, (fun fact: I actually recognized one of the horses from a trail ride I took in upstate New York!), and meeting weekly with my professor for progress updates. Another fun fact, the anesthesiologist on the project mentioned that clients fly their horses in from all over the world to receive treatment at their facility!

My professor gives me a mini reinforcement learning lecture every week and recently reminded me that RL takes things very literally and will always find the cheapest way out of a problem and explained it like the Peanut Butter Jelly Sandwich experiment, where students write the instructions and the teacher takes every step literally. In one case, his team implemented a reward for a robot to maintain a certain task over time, but the robot learned that the fastest way to avoid accumulating penalties was to immediately flop over and “die,” ending the simulation with a high score. The robot basically decided that suicide was the optimal policy. That gave me a good laugh.

Right now, I’ve gotten the learning to work well enough for my horse model to stand and walk on its own, but it’s still slightly unstable, so there’s more tuning to be done. I also took physical measurements of Coach so the model is actually based off of her and I include pictures/videos of her as reference wherever I can :)

Running training simulations overnight also turns my PC into a very effective space heater for my room. Should I be concerned about my electricity bill? Probably.

Horse Riding

*just a cowgirl (full time office worker) on a journey across the wild west (on a park trail ride) with her wild horse (the sweetest, safest horse, Coach)*

The sliding stop is a maneuver used in reining where a horse builds up speed, plants its hindquarters for a stop, and slides while the front legs keep moving. My trainer introduced me to this at slow speeds on Coach, and we even saw short slide marks in the dirt! If you check out videos of the professionals it’s super cool to see.

Well, I decided to try to practice it on my own. I didn’t have spurs that day, so getting her into a lope around the arena was nearly impossible. But the moment I asked her to go down in the middle of the arena, she really went for it. I think Coach assumed I knew what I was doing because that’s probably where my trainer usually practices the sliding stop with her. I figured I might as well attempt a longer slide stop with that speed… which was a bad idea. She’s still front-heavy and doesn’t have a smooth stop, so when she halted, her rear end bounced and I went flying. I leaned to the side so I wouldn’t land on her neck and ended up falling off.

One of the trainers, who thankfully was around that day, told me to get back on to let Coach know I was okay, even if I wasn’t. Gave Coach extra hugs and treats to let her know she did good. Someone else once told me that you have to fall off three times before you’re considered a real rider, so… one down, two more to go.

Also, the entire barn knows. My trainer just gave me a funny look at my next lesson, and I knew she knew. Apparently, news travels fast around here.

giggling after i almost fell off

she loves her treats

love me Coach pls

sniff sniff u stinky

she does NOT like squirrels

watched a cow sorting competition

I loped the barrel pattern for the first time during my lesson on a new horse, Falcon! He’s trained in barrel racing and a very forward horse so I barely had to ask him for anything and he was ready to go. My trainer had me walk and trot the pattern first and then told me to lope it.

I get a little hesitant at faster speeds now, but I know I need to just go for it. The moment we turned the first barrel, I felt uneasy and pulled the reins to stop, but Falcon basically said, “Nope, you started this so now we’re finishing it.” At that point, I focused entirely on holding on while Falcon handled the rest which was nice because he knew when to switch leads and how to turn. I was screaming the whole time and my heart was literally jumping out of my chest. Afterwards, my trainer also set up poles as visual markers for where I should pass and turn around the barrels in an attempt for me to be more in control, but Falcon interpreted those as obstacles to destroy and knocked them all down. Thankfully, he didn’t spook at that. I’m honestly shocked my feet stayed in the stirrups. All that speed and turning forced me into a proper heels-down position. Finally!

On the final run, I tried to keep two hands on the reins but still switched to neck reining in the turns. At a lope, the turns don’t look intense, but as a beginner it still feels that way so I really have to brace and counterbalance and not lean into the turn. Everything happens so fast that you can’t consciously think through every move. You just have to trust your muscle memory. Overall, I think my seat was good. I really focused on sitting back, and in the video it actually looks like I’m sitting up straight for once. Today was SO exciting <3

At my next lesson, I loped barrels on Coach, which was a total surprise! We’ll make a barrel horse out of her yet. She pushed through the pattern and seemed genuinely interested. Though since she was trained as a reining horse and not a barrel horse she sometimes hesitates because she’s unsure of what’s coming next. You have to guide her through the motions. Sometimes she’d move to turn right and I had to tell her no we’re turning left around the barrel. But she did it!! I honestly think she just has preferences and likes work that engages her brain. She absolutely hates mindless running around in circles. If we keep at it, maybe we could maybe even compete one day. That would be a dream! I still struggle with sitting her lope since she changes rhythm constantly, but we’ll get there.