Business & Media:

For the first week of build season, our business team began working on the draft for the annual business binder along with the Impact Award Executive Summary and Essay. On the other hand, our media team captured some great moments and visuals from Kickoff and our first brainstorming missions. Currently, the business and media teams are also preparing for an upcoming Robotics Engineering Workshop that the Radicubs is hosting with SWE (Society of Women Engineers). Additionally, Media is working on posting and editing upcoming blogs, including our off-season recap!

Mech:

This week, our mechanical team started by examining the game manual, as this season’s challenge is relatively unique, with details that heavily impact gameplay and robot design. Moving on to brainstorming, all team members, including our rookie members, contributed and built on each other’s ideas. We also drew inspiration from Ri3D teams and challenges from previous years. Unfortunately, we were snowed in for the rest of the week and could not continue brainstorming in person.

Programming:

Last year, we observed exceptional swerve systems from other teams at the competition. One of the first challenges we decided to take on this year was improving our swerve system since we already have last year’s robot that we can test on. We started by disassembling and lubricating each of the swerve modules. After researching the other team’s swerve code, we’re paying careful attention to properly tuning all our swerve constants this year. Lastly, we’re refactoring major parts of our drive code due to the numerous breaking changes in the latest version of Phoenix6. All in all, our driving will be the smoothest this season. 🏎️💨

Additionally, our vision capabilities have made great advancements. Using OpenCV and CUDA acceleration, one of our members has achieved exceptional performance and accuracy in detecting April Tags on the Jetson Nano. Now we can detect April Tags at a stable 25FPS at 1080p! (A massive improvement from our previous setup.) This year, we plan to fully implement April Tag detection, greatly expanding our autonomous possibilities.

The code is publicly available here (WIP): https://github.com/karth1kDuv/RadiLight