Since this was the first general meeting in nearly three years, Zach and Calix started from ground zero in terms of event planning and organization. Calix booked the room and gauged interest for attendance, and Zach began searching for a speaker for the event. Some representatives from Schlumberger had toured the shop earlier this year and asked about ways to help RoboJackets. They were happy to provide a speaker for the general meeting, an engineer from one of their subsidiaries called OneSubSea. The company specializes in marine robotics to maintain and service offshore oil rigs and pipelines. Overall, the talk was engaging and relevant to our teams, and the current leadership was happy to gain a closer relationship with one of our long-standing sponsors. After the guest speaker, each RoboJackets project manager also did a small presentation on their team’s updates and progress so far.

To top off the general meeting, Calix made a Kahoot on RoboJackets history. The questions range from easy to very difficult– some may even give our most experienced alumni a challenge! Take a look and give it a try to see how your knowledge stacks up: https://create.kahoot.it/share/gm-1-trivia/20e9714f-6cba-4e0e-8d2a-c24844b97d75 

Overall, the general meeting was a success, and it was great to hear from one of our sponsors. Since the first meeting to kick it off, another general meeting (a social with food and video games) has already been held. There are also some initial plans to rent out Tech Rec again for the first general meeting next year. More will be planned for the future as well, so if you’re interested in speaking to the RoboJackets, feel free to get in touch with Zach or Calix through Slack!

The team is making good progress on Spici. At this point, they have received all their parts and need to assemble. The team has also assembled the electronics and tested them successfully, another important milestone.

Spici has significant similarities to Gucci, including similar software strategies and the same electronic design. Alex Peng, the electrical lead in RW, said the team also plans to upgrade the electronics on Spici with new or better sensors to enable new strategies. The major change between Gucci and Spici is the plow design.

Most RoboJackets sumo robots have used a fixed plow, or a compound plow with two sections at different angles. Spici, instead, uses a hinged plow. The major advantage of a hinged plow is that it prevents enemy robots from using the leverage of your plow against you. In addition to the hinged plow, there is a smaller secondary plow underneath it to catch plows that have tilted the hinged plow up. 

As mentioned earlier, the current plan is to bring Spici to RoboGames 2023 in April. In addition, because the COVID restrictions are loosening in Japan, the team is keeping an eye out for an announcement from the organizers of the All Japan Robot Sumo Tournament to see if they will be able to attend the 2023 event next December.

RoboCup robots each have five motors – one on each of the four omni-wheels on the drivetrain, and the fifth on the motor which dribbles the ball in front of the robot. The drivetrain is powered by brushless motors which require digital commutation to spin properly. RoboJackets takes a unique approach to this task by using a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) to generate the necessary motor control signals. 

Each robot receives a velocity command from the global planner which makes coordinated strategic decisions among all robots on the team. These commands are passed over a 5GHz radio link to the on-board radio, and parsed by the central controller, the MTrain. The MTrain is a microcontroller platform that was initially designed as an upgrade to the commonly available MBed platform, and named as a reference to the hit song by the GTGs.

The MTrain manages the robot state, reads from sensors, computes control outputs, and sends kick commands to an external Kicker board. In order to manage the various functions simultaneously, the team utilizes a Real Time Operating System (RTOS). Utilizing the open-source software FreeRTOS, the students incorporated multi-threading to allow sensor reading and filtering at 200Hz without impacting critical robot functionality.