News Feed
General Body Meeting on November 14, OEH 300 at 6PM
We are having a GBM this Tuesday, November 14th, with two speakers from NREC (National Robotics Engineering Center). One, Matt Schnur, is a recent Pitt Computer Engineering alumnus! They will talk a little about their experiences working in robotics and then answer questions you guys have about NREC, careers in robotics, or anything else you'd like to know. Please bring questions for them! We will be meeting in Old Engineering Hall room 300 at 6 PM. As always, there will be pizza! Hope to see everyone there.
Thoughts on Hull Design
Looking at the kinds of things a boat in the Sailbot competition will have to do, it seems like being successful will be more determined by things like how well you can plot a course, perceive the world around you, and decide when to tack than on achieving an absolute minimum form drag. This is most clear for tasks such as collision avoidance, searching an area, keeping a station, and navigating to a waypoint. With this in mind, we will be doing anything we can to construct a platform which can deliver high quality sensor information to our perception team and which can maneuver in a predictable and responsive way. In particular, this decision has led us to develop a wide-beam multihull.
Historically in the Sailbot competition it has been popular to copy the design decisions made by the people building racing rc yachts in the Marblehead...
General Body Meeting on November 7th
We will be having an Arduino building competition for our GBM next Tuesday, November 7th! You'll get to split up in small groups to build the spookiest project possible in 2 hours. There will be pizza for all and prizes for winning team, including Arduinos and/or snack shack credit. Please come even if you don't have experience with Arduinos, we'll make sure that every team has someone with experience and projects will be judged on creativity.