My Time in Advanced Robotics at the University of Washington (ARUW)
How I First Got Involved
I was very involved with a robotics club at the University of Washington throughout my undergrad years, and it all started when I first applied to the team on a whim during my sophomore year of college.
During my freshman year, I was an Engineering Undeclared (ENGRUD) student, and the culture within the engineering schools promoted the idea of joining an engineering RSO to gain industry-relevant experience. By my sophomore year, I had just gotten into the Paul G. Allen School, where I would soon find out the culture in this department is very different. For the time being, however, I had taken along with me the mindset of being in an engineering RSO as a necessary precursor to landing an internship.
In truth, I was afraid of applying to a college robotics team at all, given I had a horrible experience with it during my last year of high school. At that time, I had just found out what FRC was and joined a community team. However, I found the environment within that team isolating towards newcomers and, especially, female members.
Before I had applied to ARUW, I attended a few of their social events, such as Battle of the Bots. There, I met their president, who was a girl! The other members I met were exceedingly friendly, and these factors were what led me to apply on a whim.
Year 1 (2021-2022)
During my first year, I spent most of my time learning the ropes of how to navigate both new and established codebases as well as how to use one’s existing knowledge of programming language (in this case, Java) to quickly learn aother (Python and C++).
One of the projects I worked on was writing the Python code to render the graphics for a debug server. More specifically, I was rendering the graphics for a “top-down”/birdseye view of what the Sentry, one of our robots that is mounted on a high railing, could see of the enemy robots below. According to the senior members at the the time, it was apparently vitally helpful, but I was doubtful of that, haha.
Little did I know, I would become extremely acquainted with the Sentry robot in my future years, to the point of borderline hating it…
Here’s a photo of an experience that kicked off the long love-hate relationship with the Sentry:
It’s me and fellow member Benjamin fielding the Sentry at the 2022 competition in Texas. The competitions we attended are called Robomaster North America (RMNA). Each annual competition is referenced by “RMNA” and the location it took place in. So this competition is referred to as “RMNA Texas.”
Year 2 (2022-2023)
All of the senior members in the team had graduated before, leading us new members a bit stranded and too inexperienced to become club leads. But we had no choice but to become so, so my second year was riddled with numerous failures/lessons in how to lead a team and mentor new members.
This year also introduced the ground Sentry such that it was no longer mounted on a railing. It now had to auto-navigate a 2D plane rather than a 1D axis, and this singular project took the software team an entire year to implement.
I ended up writing the system that detects fiducial markers on the field for localization, which was core for both our controls and motion planning code to function cohesively. I also wrote message handlers to receive information from the game servers on the NVIDIA Jetson Xavier running our auto-navigation code (this is an oversimplification). This information was used to inform the next state transition in our state machine that governed the sentry’s auto-navigation behavior throughout each 5-minute match, which I had also written.
It was quite the productive year. And what do you know? I ended up fielding the Sentry with Benjamin again because no one else understood its software quirks like we did.
This is me, slowly hating the Sentry. Just kidding. Maybe.
On the bright side, the competition was held in Seattle, so no shipping boxes or someone having to drive a robot 2000 miles only to get a flat tire (yes, that happened) were involved.
Year 3 (2023-2024)
I’ll elaborate more on this year soon! But, for now, here’s me and Benjamin fielding the Sentry a THIRD time at RMNA Colorado. The air was so thin here that everyone was on the verge of collapsing.
