This year’s GI was very successful, with the highest attendance in known history at 401 unique attendees. The RoboNav team saw the most interest at 155 sign ups. Additionally, the youngest but fast growing RoboWrestling team experienced a major jump in interest, with 87 sign ups, up from 54 sign ups last year. President Shishir Pandit-Rao said, “We were able to capitalize on the tremendous amount of interest we had received through our multiple recruiting venues.”

In order to give potential new members the best understanding of RoboJackets and its teams, officers present a holistic overview of the organization. While this includes discussing the history of RoboJackets and presenting the work of the technical teams, this is also an opportunity for officers to promote the parts of RoboJackets that aren’t directly tied to building robots. These include our outreach program, our IT/software development team, and our promotions/graphics team. Shishir added, “This year, we were able to garner a very large amount of interest for our FIRST outreach events, such as FTC Robot in 1 Weekend, as well as our gender and sexual minority group, RJ Girl Gang!” 

We are delighted to welcome these new members to RoboJackets and can’t wait to see what they can accomplish!

Another month, another alumni for us to spotlight. This month, we’ll be shining the spotlight on an alumna you’ve seen mentioned before in her capacity as the current President of the Alumni Association: Sarah Storer. Sarah graduated from Georgia Tech in 2019 with a B.S. in Computer Science. During her time in RoboJackets, Sarah was involved in many teams and took on many different positions. She started as a BattleBots member, jumped to RoboRacing, and was involved in both Outreach and RoboRacing until she became more involved in leadership. Speaking of leadership, Sarah wore many hats during her time, including Outreach Project Manager, Software Training Lead, RoboRacing Mechanical Lead, and Volunteer Coordinator, and wore a few concurrently.

Nowadays, Sarah lives in Seattle and works at Microsoft. Most of her projects are focused on “writing features and tests for new sensors that will be out on the market soon!” In her spare time, she takes care of her 100 lb Great Dane puppy, and “sailing when the weather is warm, and indoor bouldering when the weather is not so warm.” 

We also asked Sarah what lessons she learned in RoboJackets that still serve her to this day. Here’s what she had to say:

I absolutely credit the lessons I learned in RoboJackets for how successful I am in the “real world”! RoboJackets taught me discipline, how to care for others, strong leadership skills from leading people with diverse skill sets, how to manage a budget, how to organize an event for 100+ people, and most of all how to believe in myself. These skills have come in handy when I’ve needed to step up or speak up at work, code in a large project touched by 30+ people, or network. Almost everything about my job is easier because of my time in RoboJackets.

Finally, as is customary, we wanted to ask her for her favorite memory from RoboJackets:

My favorite memory in RoboJackets has changed over the years. Currently, because I’m old [author’s note: relatively speaking], my favorite memory is of my last time in the shop. It was really impactful walking through the rooms for the last time before graduating and moving out of Atlanta. It might sound cheesy but it’s almost like the walls of the shop spoke and reminded me of all the long nights, early mornings, friends made, and cookout eaten over the last 4 years. There were a lot of personal ups and downs through my time at RoboJackets but the people were always there for me and the shop was always a home for me no matter what. I will always treasure that.

September marked the first time that RoboRacing attended evGrandPrix, an electric go kart racing competition hosted at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway by Purdue University. The team ended up taking 2nd Place in the Autonomous competition after a few intense days of testing, repairing, and racing.

The excitement was high. Everyone was looking forward to the competition since this was the first time the autonomous competition was held at evGrandPrix and the first time Rigatoni would be racing. The goal of the autonomous competition was to complete five laps of the go-kart circuit in the fastest time possible. A team was allowed three resets, where the kart could be replaced on the track following an e-stop or running off the track. Since the autonomous competition is so new, only three teams competed this year: Kennesaw State University, University of California San Diego/University of Maui, and RoboJackets. As more teams compete and the competition grows, the competition organizers expect to increase the minimum speed and have multiple karts race at the same time.

The competition was held the week of the 13th, with the final race taking place on the 17th. During the week of the competition, the team had a lot of preparations to make Rigatoni ready for a successful race. And “the team’s success would best be described as a high intensity roller coaster,” said project manager Sam Walters. In the two years since getting the go-kart chassis, this was the first time Rigatoni would drive on a proper circuit. Even with testing each sub-system before competition, the team knew they would need to make adjustments. On the first test day, Rigatoni was driven manually, but the software team noticed that the steering speed (how quickly wheels could change direction) was too slow for the planner to properly navigate turns, taking about 10 seconds to turn from left to right. This meant that Rigatoni would always overshoot the course’s many sharp turns. The team attempted to increase the steering motor’s speed to address this issue until disaster struck.

The steering motor burned out on Wednesday, so the team had to scramble to get Rigatoni working on Thursday. Thanks to some help from the Kennesaw team, they were able to come up with a replacement plan. Some members drove an hour to AndyMark’s headquarters to get a replacement motor and gearbox. The mechanical team got the new hardware incorporated into the steering axle while the electrical team worked to set up a new motor controller borrowed from Kennesaw. About half the team worked through the night getting everything working, including writing new firmware for the controller. Rigatoni was driving with manual control again a few hours before the main race. Using the remaining time, the software team was able to tune the path planner so Rigatoni could run without colliding into cones. Unfortunately, due to the long testing times, the batteries could not be fully charged before the race. Rigatoni could only make it about three-quarters of a lap before cutting out, but it was enough to guarantee second place.

Despite the challenges of competition, the team is optimistic about the coming year. “We are looking forward to revamping all of our systems,” says former mechanical lead Sam Morstein. The team learned a lot from the complications at competition and took inspiration from the competitors. Electrical lead Oankar Patil told us he’s somewhat frustrated with the old designs, but is also excited about the redesign opportunities for the new systems. “There’s going to be a lot of learning and improvement coming up for the team, that’s for sure,” he said. Design work on the next iteration, Rigatonii, has already begun. Software lead Nico Bartholomai is looking forward to “seeing [Rigatonii] really speed down the track” at the next competition when (hopefully) the team has more time for software testing.

Overall, the RoboRacing team is happy with what they accomplished. “We faced a lot of setbacks,” said Sam Walters, “but [we had] the drive to continue on against all odds.” No pun intended.

The primary activities in RoboJackets are those associated with building robots, educating our members and promoting robotics to the public, but none of these activities would be possible without dedicated members and leaders, many of whom change on a year-to-year basis. Taking up the mantle of leading even a small part of RoboJackets can be a daunting task, and one of the activities designed to help build the leadership team up every year is the leadership retreat. Typically, the leadership retreat is a weekend trip that takes a swath of RoboJackets leaders out to the mountains in Georgia to get to know each other and discuss their plans for the year. This trip is usually very early in the school year, usually within the first two weeks of the fall semester. 

This year, after the creation of the Alumni Association, a small group of alumni (Ryan Strat, Matthew Barulic, and Will Stuckey, all former presidents) saw an opportunity to support RoboJackets with the leadership retreat. These three alumni all planned and ran leadership retreats during their time in RoboJackets, and all three had experience in these types of events. Unfortunately, few Presidents after them had this type of experience, and as a result, it created undue strain on the President and overall decreased the effectiveness of the leadership retreat. To rectify this, the alumni association developed a proposal in their service catalog to have alumni run portions of the leadership retreat. The goal was to take the responsibility of running the leadership development sessions off the President, which means the leadership retreat experience no longer relies on the President having experience with leadership development, and allows the President to be an active participant instead of a facilitator. The intention is for this to be a continuing effort and will repeat indefinitely, as long as both parties think it’s still beneficial.

This year’s leadership retreat was the first leadership retreat to be run in this manner. Four alumni (The three already mentioned and Sarah Storer) went out to the Blue Ridge mountains with the students and stayed separately in a nearby cabin. They planned and ran a bevy of activities designed to promote discussion among the leaders present and help them prepare to take on the new year of RoboJackets. Many of the activities were guided discussions reflecting on various aspects of RoboJackets, including why they became leaders in RoboJackets, what parts of the RoboJackets mission statement had the most impact on them, and what memories they had in RoboJackets that had big impacts on them. The current President, Shishir, still led one reflection, which was the discussion on leadership goals for the coming year and focused on finding strengths and weaknesses within every leader and building a team. 

There was one activity that had a portion that wasn’t a discussion. Specifically, it was an egg drop challenge (IE, build a system that can protect an egg when dropped) with a twist: the participants had to pick some of their building materials before they knew it was an egg drop challenge. The goal of this activity was to help students handle failure (IE, picking bad materials to help with an egg drop challenge) under dynamic constraints. 

We wanted to ask both sides of the trip, alumni and students for their thoughts on how the trip went. We started by asking Keertik Bacon, mechanical training lead, for his thoughts on a few topics. First, we wanted to ask how well the retreat met the objectives that the alumni set out to achieve. The overarching goal of the retreat is to set the leadership team up for success in the coming year. Here’s what Keertik had to say about that:

I definitely think that the leadership retreat helped me get into a better headspace [for the year to come]. I’m a shy person, so I tend to hesitate to reach out to others, especially those who I don’t know very well. In that regard, the retreat was really great, in that it helped me get to know a lot of people on a more personal level than we usually get to do in our day-to-day work in RoboJackets. It made me more comfortable talking to them and asking them for things, which is essential in a team environment.

Next, we wanted to ask what impact the alumni involvement had. He struck on exactly what the goal of involving alumni in the retreat was in the first place:

It’s my understanding that in previous years, the president was the one who ran all the activities, but with the alumni taking that over, Shishir was able to join as a participant rather than a facilitator. It’s a small distinction, but I think it helps a lot in bringing us leaders closer together, with the knowledge that we’re all in the same boat.

All in all, he said that the alumni involvement was “a great thing.”

We also asked Keertik which activities he thought were most helpful. The one he thought was most helpful was the discussion that Shishir led around personal strengths and weaknesses: “it allowed me to be frank about my weaknesses as a leader and seek advice from other leaders on how to go about improving in those fields.” His favorite activity, though, was the egg drop:

My team didn’t do particularly well, but it was just a fun experience to try and work with what we had—Play Doh, pipe cleaners, and a paper towel roll—to make something, anything that would protect the egg. It was also especially funny to see the other teams’ solutions, which included gutting a teddy bear to use its stuffing as padding, as well as putting the egg in a bag of marshmallows to cushion it.

We also asked Will Stuckey, one of the alumni facilitators for his thoughts. He echoed a lot of the positive impacts that Keertik highlighted.

Overall I was really pleased with the retreat. I felt we finally struck a balance for alumni involvement that worked for all parties, and that was a huge relief after a few years of trying to pin that down. The team put a lot of work into guiding and shaping rather than explicitly leading discussion. It was really rewarding to help empower this generation of leaders to take more direct agency over the organization.

We also asked what activity he thought was the most meaningful. The one he pointed to was a guided reflection on which RoboJackets members had an impact on each participant, saying “I think it can really ground people into believing they have the capacity to help and serve others, and I personally think that sets a good tone for the year.” He also acknowledges the interpersonal part of the retreat as a major contribution: “You could even argue the students’ down time to just get to know each other is equally valuable [compared to the guided discussions].”

The alumni sponsors have gathered feedback on the retreat from the President and from an anonymous feedback form. The alumni involvement with the leadership retreat is intended to be an ongoing relationship between alumni and students to better serve student leaders long into the future. Some feedback they received indicated that some students would be interested in facilitating the leadership retreat in the future when they become alumni, suggesting that the model has the potential to continue beyond this first generation of alumni.

We’ll leave you with the current President, Shishir Pandit-Rao’s thoughts on the retreat:

Leadership retreat was an extremely successful event due to a multitude of reasons. The development of thoughtful discussion, especially related to the goals of the leadership team with regards to the organization, set the stage for the coming year in terms of goals and objectives. In addition, having discussions revolving around what the leaders wanted to see from their respective teams, as well as the organization as a whole, set the stage for a culture of accountability and progress.