RoboJackets is an organization that participates in a wide range of robotics competitions, and as a result, has a tremendous need for financial resources. These resources are not only for building our robots (which are mostly funded by the Student Government Association through the student activity fee), but also for costs like the domestic and international travel necessary to bring members to competition. 

To better manage non-institute controlled assets and ensure the long-term financial health of RoboJackets, a small group of alumni have been working for the past year to form a nonprofit corporation to support the student organization. This will provide a range of benefits, including more oversight over non-institute-controlled assets, as well as a legal entity that can hold a bank account and be issued lines of credit. The intent is for a small group of RoboJackets Alumni to serve as directors of the corporation and provide support to the current RoboJackets officers. Additionally, the corporation has applied for tax-exempt status under section 501(c)(7). RoboJackets, Inc.’s board of directors’ meeting minutes, and other documents, are publicly available at https://corporate.robojackets.org/.

In this article, we’d also like to introduce the corporate board of directors, all of whom are former RoboJackets officers. The board has five directors that form a decision-making body. In addition to these five directors, the corporation has three officer positions: President, Treasurer and Secretary. At this time, three of the directors of the board are also filling those three positions. In addition to some quick facts about their Georgia Tech and RoboJackets experience, we asked each of them what motivated them to be a part of forming RoboJackets, Inc.

First, the President of the RoboJackets, Inc. is Ryan Strat. Ryan graduated from Georgia Tech with a B.S. in Computer Science in 2017. Like everyone else on the board, he wore many hats during his time in RoboJackets, including IT Coordinator, RoboCup Project Manager, and President. In 2017, he was selected to serve on the Organizing Committee of the RoboCup Small Size League, eventually serving as the chair. Currently, he is enrolled in the Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) Program at Georgia Tech, and works as a platform engineer at Silectis, a data engineering startup in Washington, D.C. His motivation for serving as an incorporating director and President: 

More people than ever are realizing how a RoboJackets experience can help them grow as engineers, resulting in massive membership growth. I want to ensure that the infrastructure is in place for RoboJackets to continue growing in the future without introducing new legal or financial risks.

Second, the Treasurer of RoboJackets, Inc. is Kristaps Berzinch. He graduated from Georgia Tech with a B.S. in Computer Science in 2019. During his time in RoboJackets, he was part of the Outreach subteam and also served as their first Assistant Project Manager. Additionally, he served as Treasurer of RoboJackets, IT Coordinator, and played an instrumental role as the first web application product owner in developing the web applications we now use to better manage our membership. Currently, he works as a software engineer for Capital One’s credit card division in Washington, D.C. His motivation for serving as an incorporating director: “as a former treasurer, I know first-hand the challenges of the role. We aim to support the treasurer and the rest of the officer team in ways the Institute can’t or won’t.”

Third, the Secretary of RoboJackets, Inc. is Jonathan Spalten, coincidentally the author of this article. He graduated from Georgia Tech with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering in 2019. During his time in RoboJackets, he worked in BattleBots as a Sumo Lead, participated in the mechanical training program and served as Vice President in 2018-2019, earning him the title of Vice President Emeritus. Currently, he works as a mechanical design engineer at W. L. Gore & Associates in Maryland. His reason for serving as an incorporating director: 

RoboJackets meant a lot to me as a student, and I continue to believe its mission is incredibly valuable, even more so after some time out in industry. I want to provide whatever support I can to the organization, and helping maintain long-term financial health will be vital to enabling RoboJackets to climb to greater heights.

Fourth, we have Matt Barulic. He received a B.S. in Computer Science in 2016, and graduated with a M.S. in Computer Science in 2020. During his time in RoboJackets, he participated in every competition team, started the software training program, and served as President of RoboJackets 2015-2016. Currently, he continues building robots for Microsoft’s Azure Compute Robotics team in Atlanta. Matt has a rule that’s been widely quoted in RoboJackets: “If you put RoboBuzz on it, I’ll buy it.” More seriously, he said:

The RoboJackets mission is incredibly valuable and the student organization continues to show amazing potential at carrying that mission to new, exciting places. Incorporating the organization creates an opportunity to provide students with more sustainable financial resources and relieves students of certain burdens beyond the scope of the RoboJackets student experience.

Finally, the last director of the board is Jason Gibson. He graduated from Georgia Tech with a B.S. in Computer Science in 2019. While he was in RoboJackets, he worked on RoboNav (formerly IGVC) on the software team, including becoming subteam lead. He has been heavily involved in the org-wide software training program, and served as the President of RoboJackets 2018-2019. He is currently a PhD student at GT studying “game theoretic motion planning under uncertainty”, and manages the AutoRally platform (discussed in RoboResearch Volume 3). His motivation for being an incorporating director: 

I know that RoboJackets had a strong impact on my life and on my growth as an individual. I joined the incorporation effort so that we can ensure that others have the same opportunities that I had in RoboJackets for a long time to come.

A core part of the RoboJackets mission is to support local K-12 robotics programs. Since 2008, a major part of the support we provide has been hosting the annual GeorgiaFIRST Kickoff for the FIRST Robotics’ Competition (FRC). For the uninitiated, FRC is a high school level international robotics competition where students design, build, and program a robot to complete certain tasks and score points in a game that is devised by the FIRST organization each year. The game rules are revealed during the kickoff event, after which teams will have about six to seven weeks to build their robots before competing in tournament-style competitions with the goal of qualifying for the state- and international-level competitions.

The kickoff event is an important component of the GAFIRST experience. Not only do teams come from all over the state to watch the official FIRST kickoff stream and hear from speakers, they also come to pick up their Kit of Parts, a set of parts that each team starts out with to build their bot, and begin planning their strategy for the newly revealed game.

For years, RoboJackets has assisted the GeorgiaFIRST organization by planning the kickoff event. We organize speakers to get students excited about robotics, book space and catering, organize Kit of Parts distribution, and present a series of workshops following the reveal of the game to help students gain a better technical understanding of robot design and strategy. 

Though this year came with a significantly different set of circumstances, kickoff was still on. Starting in October, our kickoff coordinator, Evan Strat, worked closely with fellow RoboJackets members Todd Hayes, Malak Bayyari, and Outreach Chair Michael Chen, along with GAFIRST Executive Director Connie Haynes and GAFIRST Board Chairman Brian Cooksy, to move the event to a virtual format. Moving online made a lot of logistical planning easier, as all of the physical overhead was removed. However, the uncertainty of the pandemic meant that many details didn’t get finalized until much later than usual. Said Strat: “The event itself changed forms a few times.  Initially, we were going to have a little ceremony at 9am and workshops at the usual time in the afternoon.  Then we decided we could compress it to just 12-3pm, and then FIRST said they’d have their webcast at noon and so we ended up structuring things around that.” He also worked to make sure all presenters and workshop leads were trained to use BlueJeans before the event and was on call on the day of in case technical difficulties came up.

Despite taking place online, over 230 people attended the opening ceremony broadcast and 168 people participated in the RoboJackets run virtual workshops following the ceremony. 

The workshops this year included Strategy, Mechanical, Electrical, Software, a session geared specifically towards rookie teams to familiarize them with FRC, and a new Controls workshop intended to introduce more advanced topics to students. A major challenge the kickoff planning team ran into was translating the workshops to a virtual environment. Some sessions – like the one on bumpers – ended up not making an appearance this year when it became clear there would not be a good way for teams to get the same educational value from the session compared to what they would from an in person event, as RoboJackets members had limited resources available and were therefore unable to give demonstrations using actual parts. Furthermore, sessions that would typically have a larger physical component like Mechanical and Electrical were pivoted to introduce more theory and give students a deeper understanding of the concepts behind the designs of their robots. 

The GAFIRST FRC Kickoff took on a significantly different form this year, with very different challenges. However, through the efforts of several RoboJackets volunteers working closely with GAFIRST leadership, the event ended up being a success, and we hope that next year will bring kickoff back to being in person. If you’re interested in seeing the content from this year’s virtual kickoff, we have uploaded recordings of the sessions and opening ceremonies on the RoboJackets YouTube channel.

Over the course of winter break, a few of our members participated in an internal Printed Circuit Board (PCB) Design Competition, organized by a few of our older electrical members. The goal was for members to get a chance to design a unique PCB for judging that they may not get the opportunity to make for one of our robots. 

There were two categories for entry: beginner and advanced. The beginner category was targeted towards first and second year electrical members, or even non-electrical RoboJackets members, to learn new skills or reinforce recently learned skills from our training program. The advanced category was for more experienced members to push the limits of their design abilities. The beginner category was judged by 3rd and 4th year members, and the advanced category was overseen by RoboJackets alumni. 

All PCBs had to be designed in the RoboJackets PCB CAD tool of choice, Autodesk EAGLE. The participants were given a rubric of evaluated design criteria such as feasibility, creativity, cost efficiency, and even RJ style guide compliance. They had from December 14th to January 14th to complete the design, along with generating a descriptive write up and Bill of Materials. The winner of each category would be rewarded with their PCB, assembled by our older electrical members. 

The winner of the beginner category was Josiah Koh. He designed a board to control an 8x8x8 LED cube using a ESP32. The advanced category winner was Stephen Fazio. He designed a board that shoots string with motors as an all-in-one package.  

Our RoboCup team is in the middle of a major software re-organization, re-writing key parts of their software stack in order to leverage ROS 2.

What is ROS?

According to Open Robotics, the organization that created the software, “The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a set of software libraries and tools that help you build robot applications” (from https://ros.org). The core libraries of ROS implement a message-passing system for cross-platform inter-process communication. ROS has recently undergone a major update from ROS 1 to ROS 2, offering better performance for real-time applications. RoboNav and RoboRacing both use ROS 1, as they have for years, but plan to update to ROS 2 soon.

This integration of ROS into the RoboCup technology stack is not simply a light refactoring of a few bits of code — it changes the whole software architecture. This begs the question of why it’s worthwhile to undertake such a project. 

Firstly, using ROS simplifies a complex part of RoboCup’s code base that deals with multi-language support. RoboCup programs their high-level strategies (such as running coordinated team plays) in Python, while they code their motion planning and controls in C++. Using ROS 2 for inter-process communication greatly simplifies the problem of communicating between these two systems. The previous “bridge” code between the two added a lot of maintenance overhead for the team and was difficult to explain to new members. ROS’s distributed message-passing system, by comparison, is much easier for new members to learn, and experienced members of the team don’t have to maintain it as an added project. 

Second, it allows for more knowledge sharing between RoboCup, RoboNav, and RoboRacing, as all three teams use ROS. RoboCup has support from other teams during the code migration, and software training for new members can now be combined for the three teams not only for C++ concepts, as in the past, but also for ROS concepts. For years, RoboNav (IGVC) and RoboRacing have been co-developing training materials and sharing technical expertise with one another to greatly improve the technical teams’ experience on both sides. Including RoboCup in this relationship will increase the strength of RoboJackets’ software teams together, building on the foundation established by RoboNav and RoboRacing.

For all its potential upsides, this project is no small undertaking and will reshape RoboCup’s entire software architecture. Team member Kyle Stachowicz is leading the migration effort, which has been making steady progress in recent months and is nearing completion.

In the old architecture, all of the software modules share a global state called Context, and the overall program flow is coordinated by the Processor module. This kind of system architecture (the kind with lots of shared global state) can have very good performance, but is notoriously hard to maintain, debug, and test.

By contrast, migrating to ROS allows for a more modular software architecture. By passing messages between different parts of the stack, these different modules of the overall system no longer need the shared Context state. Each module or sub-group of modules has well-defined inputs and outputs, and its behavior can be tested and monitored independently.

The migration to this new architecture has required heavy refactoring of the code base, mostly on the autonomy (C++) side of things. But the payouts, from ease of development and training, to better modularity, to knowledge sharing with other ROS teams, promise to be worth the effort.

Just after finals ended last semester, a small team of our members dedicated some of their free days to cleaning, organizing, and improving our space in the Student Competition Center (SCC). The casually dubbed “Shop Rehab Day” actually took place over 3 days and involved repainting walls, throwing out or giving away unused items, replacing furniture, and wiping down tables and computers. A mural was also painted in the mechanical room to give the shop some additional RoboJackets spirit.

Cleaning and organizing are not activities that tend to be on the top of the list of hobbies for a college student; however, our members buckled down and put in the time to improve and update our shop. Shop rehab participant and RoboJackets president Alex Field had this to say about the event:

I think what stands out to me the most is how excited and enthusiastic everyone was to improve the space. Our members spend a significant portion of their time at Georgia Tech at our shop so this is a place that contains a lot of meaningful experiences and memories for the students. It means a lot that everyone wanted to work so hard to give back to the space and I am proud of everything that was accomplished during the event.

The main project of this year’s Shop Rehab Day was the new mural in the mechanical room, shown above. The mural includes RoboBuzz, our beloved mascot, and the RoboJackets mission statement: promote, educate, advance. This mural will advertise our mission to new members and act as a centerpiece of our shop when hosting sponsors.

The undertaking begun in December will continue into the spring semester with organization of our space in the SCC mezzanine, an IT cleanout, and installation of additional storage in the mechanical and field rooms. There are already plans to make Shop Rehab Day a yearly event for RoboJackets, and we hope to see future members enthusiastically participate in and benefit from this effort.