When you first enter the shop, you will be greeted by our check-in kiosk. Currently, it’s connected to our People Counter system, which we use to keep track of how many people are in the shop at any given time to ensure occupancy restrictions are being met. This also integrates with MyRoboJackets, which allows us to track meeting attendance. Beyond that is our shelf for deliveries, backpacks, and safety supplies, including our UV cleaner for safety glasses.

Continuing through, you’ll reach our build room. This is the primary place where teams assemble robots or manufacture parts. You’ll find a myriad of hand tools, power tools, stock materials, and general use components amongst the shelves and drawers. Many RJ members have spent a lot of time at this old steel-topped table built by old RJ members for the space. Some tools, like the belt sander, drill press, and red tool box, have been a part of RoboJackets since nearly the beginning, dating back to 2003 and 2004. 

The large space is also used to keep the larger robots, like Jessiii and Bigoli, and display our trophies and awards from the years.

Here you can see Varun Madabushi working on Hockii, the meltybrain combat robot.

When you enter the space, if you instead turn to the right, you would be in the electrical room. The electrical room has a long work bench where electrical members can work on their custom PCBs and components. You can find soldering irons, power supplies, an oscilloscope, and anything else useful for working on electronics. You’ll also find a custom built cabinet with dedicated space for each team’s components and drawers for other tools and common components. It also features some art from our members. 

Opposite from the electrical room is the office. The office is home to several CAD workstations and our 3D printer. Any team can use this space as needed, but it usually the place for design conversations and team planning. 

Beyond the office through the window is the RoboCup field and storage space. The centerpiece of the room is the RoboCup field, which is about a half the size of the Division B field used at RoboCup. In front is the team’s control center, where they get the live camera feed from above and control the robots. Along the left wall, teams have a dedicated shelf or cabinet for stock, parts, and other tools for their robots, with more storage under the field.

We hoped you enjoyed this look into the shop when it isn’t full of RoboJackets, building their robots.

Enjoy some photos of members in the shop from before 2020.

RoboJackets alumni go on to a wide variety of accomplishments after their time in RoboJackets, but we always hope they bring a bit of RoboJackets along with them. We’d like to take some time to check back in with some of our alumni and ask “Where are they now?” and what part of RoboJackets they still bring with them.

This issue, we reached out to Brad Geving, the founder of RoboJackets, to catch back up with him and ask him about his time in the club in its infancy. First things first, Brad was at Georgia Tech from 1994 to 2000, completing a B.S. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering. When he was a student, he was interested in robotics, but there wasn’t a place for him to do that on campus. He wasn’t sure about a club addressing the problem: 

I thought about how a club could solve that problem, but it seemed that unless there was a goal, there would be no direction for robotics projects.  A robotics club for the sake of doing robotics might get pretty boring.  I found the competitive nature of BattleBots quite motivating so that’s the epiphany I had: that competition provides the goal and a club provides the pool of resources to achieve that goal.

He also foresaw that BattleBots wouldn’t be the only competition that people might have interest in, so he wanted it to be a more general competitive robotics club: “I thought it was important for a competitive robotics club to be flexible enough to incorporate any kind of robotics competition that people were passionate about in the future.  So in other words, I didn’t think it would be good to start a BattleBots club when it’s the competition aspect that matters.” Brad began pitching the idea around, and while he had his doubts, ultimately as he “met more and more people who were interested, [he] found new inspiration in the passion those people had for robotics and that increased the sense of responsibility [he] felt to make it happen.” Needless to say, it’s that initial drive that led RoboJackets to the form it is today, with 6 separate competition teams across a wide variety of competitions. 

As the founder, his primary contributions in RoboJackets were setting the club up for future success:

Most of my time was spent advocating for the club and developing infrastructure so future generations had something to work with.  The club was founded on the heels of a Battlebots competition so that was my main actual robotics contribution. But mostly my time was spent lobbying the administration for space and resources (for which the ME administration was quite generous and supportive), the Student Government for budgets, the Alumni Foundation for more budget and really anyone who would listen for budget.

Now, Brad lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Shelley, and terrier, Winston. In his career: 

I currently lead the media buying and operations team at an AdTech company called Tatari, which was co-founded 5 years ago by a friend I met 23 years ago at Georgia Tech (small world).  On the surface, my current job may seem far removed from robotics, but we’re sort of applying control algorithm techniques to media buying decisions and from that perspective many of the concepts I learned in engineering are applied here.

In his spare time, Brad dabbles in Arduino and 3D printing projects. He also loves all the outdoor activities in LA.

Finally, we asked Brad for his favorite memory from RoboJackets. Here it is, in Brad’s own words:

For the Battlebots build, Damon Padgett and I were notified that the competition was going to take place in just 7 weeks and we were starting from scratch so needless to say we were in trouble. We worked furiously to get the bot ready, but we had only portions of the shell ready by the deadline to submit “proof of functionality” photos. We had to prop up the frame and take a photo from a specific angle to make it look like a completed bot. In actuality, though, the bot had nothing inside! Somehow we passed the test (mind you, this is before it was easy to share video so they didn’t have that requirement or we would have been toast). After that, we pulled several all-nighters and about 500 trips to Home Depot to get the thing ready in time. We actually packed the whole 55-lb bot and all of our tools into two suitcases and checked them on the plane to Long Beach, CA. Thinking back, it’s amazing that everything came together in time to compete. But, as they say, where there is a will, there is a way. We were at Georgia Tech so we could do that.

The last note he ended on was a memory he had of meeting Grant Imahara, best known for his time on MythBusters, at that competition and running into him later:

As an aside, at the competition we got to meet Grant Imahara, who was just another non-famous bot builder at the time, and we got to know his incredible personality.  I met him again when the RoboJackets team came to compete in 2017 and fame hadn’t changed Grant a bit – still his humble self.  The robotics community truly has some amazing people and I’m grateful that the RoboJackets experience has made it possible to meet some of them.

As the inaugural appointee, Brian Epstein worked with then-President Alex Field to define the position’s responsibilities. He spent the rest of the year building out a formal structure for managing communications with sponsors. This included overhauling the sponsorship packet with the help of our PR Chair Cameron Loyd, and migrating correspondence tracking from spreadsheets to Hubspot. He leveraged Hubspot’s customer relationship management (CRM) system, which “consolidates all the sponsor information to one location, and allows us to more easily track sponsor engagement and benefit utilization.” What was previously handled primarily by the President or Project Managers through their individual inboxes is now managed and tracked through a centralized pipeline process. Incoming Sponsorship Chair Bennett Bush is excited to start building relationships with current sponsors, saying “I’m hoping to set up and facilitate multiple recruiting events – events that weren’t possible last year due to COVID – to our [eligible] sponsors.” He also hopes to create new relationships by heavily increasing our cold calling efforts. 

When asked about long term plans, Alex Field envisions the role to evolve from initiator to facilitator, saying, “I think project managers and other leaders will have a much easier path to getting involved in the business side of [RoboJackets] due to the development of a proper system to reach out to companies.” He also hopes that we can expand the types of interactions we have with our sponsors, including sponsorships for longer projects and events to give our thanks to companies that support us.
You can learn more about our sponsorships and view our Sponsorship packet here: https://robojackets.org/our-sponsors/

RoboNav delivered an impressive performance: out of 9 teams competing in the AutoNav challenge, they placed 3rd in the design category and 4th overall. Jessiii completed more of the course this year than at the 2019 competition, and indeed more than any other RoboJackets entry to IGVC since 2012!

Now, you might be wondering what this course actually is. Traditionally, the IGVC obstacle course, being the primary challenge of the competition, is a track painted on grassy terrain with traffic barrels as obstacles. Teams aim to complete a full lap around the course without touching any obstacles or lines. In past years, only a few teams have been able to achieve this due to the visual processing and mechanical robustness required by the complex environment.

This year, the course was instead arranged on pavement to have it at the same location as the other parts of the IGVC competition. While this brought some advantages due to flatter terrain, it also tasked the team with preparing a new model for recognizing the lines with little time before the competition. The software team came together to collect and label data for lines on pavements in the SCC parking lot, and the newly retrained neural network was successful. Nonetheless, there were more preparations to be made even before going to the competition.

There were a number of hurdles that RoboNav had to persevere through just to start the event, let alone place 4th. Perhaps chief among these hurdles, as for so many other things, was the COVID-19 pandemic. For safety reasons, shop access has been limited in personnel and also in time — so, many team meetings only had 1 team member familiar with the software, and there could be no late-night debugging sessions at the shop in the weeks before competition. As a result, Jessiii had not run in over a year and still needed work. 

Having the team together at the competition field gave them the opportunity for uninterrupted, collaborative, hands-on time to work. The team made good use of it by working throughout the day and gradually meeting the requirements to qualify and compete. The new wireless e-stop system, originally a new member project but untouched for longer than a year, was rebuilt and several issues were ironed out to get it working. They fixed the firmware controlling the motion of the wheels and the connections to the encoders, issues that had been plaguing the team since Jessiii’s last rewire. Batteries were repeatedly hauled to and from the pits in order to keep the debugging and testing going. By the final day of the AutoNav Challenge, these issues were worked out well enough to make Jessiii competitive. Kudos to everyone who made this happen!

While RoboJackets values working hard at competition, we also know that this doesn’t exclude having fun and making friends. For RoboNav at IGVC, the debugging sessions were reported to be a bonding experience within the team; only a few people could work on Jessiii at once, but the rest were having a good time and supplying support with other necessities like recharging batteries. RoboNav also made connections by walking around the pits and talking to other teams. After a friendly discussion about different robot design choices, one of these other teams even came to watch and support the RoboJackets design presentation.

The RJ Newsletter team asked Chuck Li, incoming RoboNav Project Manager, what the biggest team takeaways are from competition this year. It boils down to knowledge transfer, he told us. No one that went to IGVC this year had been to the competition previously, so it was hard to know how to prepare for design judging questions, how many tools to pack, or how to debug some of Jessiii’s systems in the field, for example. Thankfully, recent alumni were able to lend guidance in some cases, but RoboNav would like to implement a better process of passing down this kind of experience year over year.

In conclusion, RoboNav seems to have made the best of this competition. With a tried-and-true robot design but a lot of debugging and learning to do, the team came together to make it work.

If you’d like to see the design presentation that won the team 3rd place for yourself, you can find it below:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1O4PRixSEz1VS8OhbZIS_FV0dYKntPa6aQ0U3ckp3cuY/edit?usp=sharing