Robotathon Steering Committee - Your First Program Update

03 Mar 2020

Hey y’all, this is Matthew, one of the co-heads of Robotathon. This is the first of several updates throughout this semester from our new Robotathon steering committee. We’ve extended the original Robotathon committee in order to create a more robust and engaging competition. Among the goals that we want to complete this semester, we have:

• Getting feedback and insight from last year’s Robotathon teams to develop an engaging competition task.
• Building a new robotathon field.
  • Building the field this semester allows us to better define the rules of the game (for example, how big can the robots be) and jumpstart teams wanting to scope out the field and test their robot prototypes.
• Develop instructional videos and documentation.
  • We recognize that setting up your development environment and interfacing hardware is difficult. That’s why we’re making a renewed effort this year to write clear, helpful, and concise documentation that you can use. Wait for an update in a couple weeks where we will present some of our work on this front.
• Prototyping our own robot!
  • In previous years, some of our RAS leaders have made a robot for competition the night of and competed with varying levels of success. This robot, however, will be for informing us on how to better help teams make their own robots. For example, we’ll learn valuable information on how to write driver interfaces that you will use, as well as determine important development concepts that we’ll pass on through tech talks and office hours hosted throughout the Robotathon competition season. Where we are currently at:
• We’ve determined the Robotathon competition for this fall! It’s a secret for now, but we may tease some snapshots of our design later on.
• A field design has been finalized, and we’ve delegated part of our team to develop each of the individual sections (!!).
• We’re debating a ruleset and scoring system that will be fair for all teams. There will be multiple ways to win points during this competition, so teams can become specialists or generalists.

Here’s a low res picture spoiler (our VP Reiko is designing some new art). If any of this sounds interesting we’re always accepting members throughout the semester. There’s plenty of software development, hardware integration, and leadership experience to be had here. You can join our slack at utras.slack.com and message me (@RoboticFish) or the other co-lead (@Burak Biyikli) or email me at matthewjkyu@gmail.com. Author: Matthew Yu