The Autonomous Rover Team (ART) focuses on building fully autonomous robots to perform meaningful functions, often involving navigation and environment manipulation. Our members build the robot from the ground up, including its design, mechanical and electrical subsystems, navigation software, and computer vision models. The functionality is often motivated by various national and international competitions we aim to attend towards the end of each academic year.
Out of metals and woods, we build the MUSCLES and BONES of the robots.
The electrical team serves as a bridge between the software and mechanical parts of the robot. Here you will work on motors, power systems and sensors.
This year, the mechanical and the electrical teams are going to refurbish the heavy giant Caffeine that sits in the basement of Myhal. We are also going to disassemble a 50+ mph RC Crawler and build it into the second version of our small autonomous rover Proton, but named Photon! No prior experience is necessary as long as you are interested and dedicated! The team will host virtual workshops to gear you up for any challenges ahead.
You’ve heard of all the buzz-words, and now, you can finally learn what they mean. On the vision team, we’ll focus on developing a pipeline to serve as the “eyes” of the robot. We’ll leverage input from cameras and other spatial sensors to detect and identify objects within the environment and provide this information to the robot to aid in its navigation. We develop numerous robust machine learning models to assist us in classification, and train them using rich, self-curated datasets. Members of this team will learn about the fundamentals of object detection using image processing and machine learning… oh and a little bit of math! No prior experience is necessary.
Picture this, you have a robot built, sensors ready and an obstacle detection model working - but your robot doesn’t move. The ROS team serves as the glue between all the other sub-teams by leveraging ROS to process sensor inputs and produce appropriate motor commands to make the robot move autonomously. Early on, the ROS team uses simulation extensively to build a fully functional, competition ready robot and afterwards, focuses on migrating the code base onto the actual robot. With us, expect to learn about ROS, code development, simulation, navigation and system design!
