The team video highlights current robot performance. It requires at least one minute of unedited game play with at least two robots participating in shooting on a goalie, going for ball capture, or movement against static defenders. 

With both the video and paper submitted back in January, the team heard back recently that they have qualified for RoboCup 2023! This will be the first time they attend an in-person competition since 2019. They will be headed to Bordeaux, France this summer. If you are interested in watching the team video, it is linked here. 

Megan Huang, the RoboRacing project manager, has been involved in the planning of this new competition. Every other week, she meets with representatives from other EVGP teams to discuss rulesets and logistics. The competition was renamed as the Autonomous Karting Series (AKS), and it will be held on May 15-19. Purdue Autonomous Motorsports have reserved the original evGP Autonomous track as an independent club, and a website for AKS is now under construction. Since the competition is now organized independently of evGP, individual teams have more of a say in the details and logistics. 

We’re happy to see the efforts from RoboJackets in preserving this unique competitive forum. As Megan said, “There are competitions centered around building a go kart and competitions centered around automating pre-made vehicles, but it is difficult to find competitions like evGP Autonomous that combine both aspects… [this is] why I am so interested in the continuation of this competition. It brings a lot of space for people in mechanical, electrical, and software disciplines to learn.” Hopefully, with the leadership from RoboRacing and all the other teams from EVGP Autonomous, AKS will have a successful inaugural year.

Internally, RoboJackets made some changes to how the organization organizes the event. In the past, Kickoff has been coordinated by a single appointed officer, the Kickoff Coordinator. This year, in recognition of the importance of the event to the community and the amount of work required, the position was split into a small committee of three members, one 4th year and two 2nd years. This year’s Committee was Shishir Pandit-Rao, Abhiram Ghanta, and Yashas Ambati. In addition to the work distribution, there is also a knowledge transfer component. Shishir said: “by developing this committee approach, we hope to maintain better knowledge transfer to ensure this event is run smoothly for years to come!”

One change this year was holding the workshops before the presentations instead of after, as they had been in the past. This was done in response to feedback from attendees that the teams wanted more time during the day, and allowed teams to start on designs immediately after the game was revealed instead of having to split up to go to workshops. 

RoboJackets hosted three workshops, one for each major discipline in FRC: Mechanical, Electrical, and Software. Notably, this year had much higher workshop participation than past years, between 40-70 attendees in each workshop, compared to 10-20 in previous years. Abhiram Ghanta attributed this to the fact that the workshops were held before the kickoff broadcast. In addition to these workshops, there are workshops that are related to the specifics of the game that were moved to a virtual format to be hosted by Georgia FIRST a week after kickoff.

Shishir was proud of the event overall:

This year’s FIRST Robotics Competition Kickoff event was an astounding success! With over 60 teams and 500+ registered attendees, this event is growing year by year, allowing students to get the first glimpse of the game in a collaborative space with other teams, as well as allowing students to develop knowledge with our technical workshops.