The Alumni Association is a recent addition to the RoboJackets organizations and is a great way for former members to reconnect with each other for personal and professional networking. Beyond that, it provides a way for alumni to continue to support RoboJackets through donations and mentoring current students. Today we are going to take a quick look at the ways that the association can help the students through a collection of projects proposed by the current members of the alumni association.

There are two forms for the activities the association may perform. The first are long-term collaborations between current students and alumni, dubbed “projects”. These are on-going projects meant to last a long time that require collaborative effort from students and alumni. The second are on-demand activities that are smaller in scope, led by alumni, dubbed “services”. These are activities that are proposed by alumni and requested from current RJ leadership that can help the organization operate. The goal of both of these activities is to continue and improve developing students’ skills by supplementing student efforts. Care is taken to avoid taking work from current students and only assisting in areas where alumni have experience that students may not.

The end result is a list of ways that alumni can help out. Below is the current catalog offered. You can read about each offering more in-depth in the official catalog. If you are an alumnus and are interested in helping with any of these efforts, make sure you join the alumni Slack and fill out the volunteer survey so you can be contacted for further information. Thank you for your help!

Services:

• Alumni Design Reviewers: With experience in RoboJackets and in industry, alumni are the perfect candidates for providing design feedback to current members in any field. This service provides alumni volunteers that can attend RJ design reviews. While students are still responsible for coordinating design reviews, alumni can improve the quality of the review and model good review practices for the students.
• Event Planning Mentorship: The pandemic made almost all in-person events non-existent for the past year, which has reduced the number of students in RoboJackets who have attended or hosted events. This loss of experience can be made up using the experience of alumni mentors in planning and coordinating internal and external events. The goal of this service is to provide valuable planning resources to the students planning these events.
• Shop Furniture Construction: Custom furniture helps meet the needs of RoboJackets’ shop space while also reducing the cost. Building furniture, however, requires time and skills that students may not have. If the students need help with a furniture project, alumni can provide design and construction assistance.
• Shop Layout Consulting: In a similar vein as above, managing a shared maker space can be difficult, especially without the historical knowledge of the space. This service provides consulting volunteers that can assist students with planning or managing the layout of the shop to best meet their needs.
• Small Tool Training: The SCC has a system in place to train students on using the large machining equipment in the CMA, but RoboJackets lacks such a system for smaller tooling in RJ shop space. The goal of this service is to help bridge any generational gaps in knowledge of using these tools by providing alumni to lead a session on using these tools. This allows students to better understand and use these tools and to create up to date documentation on them.
• Software Training Curriculum Development: Training new members is critical to RoboJackets’ success but puts a lot of responsibility on students. Since the training content does not change much from year to year, this is a perfect opportunity for alumni to do some of the demanding work. This service provides alumni who can help develop the training curriculum and prepare the student trainers with resources and tools to be used in the training sessions. Currently the association is providing help with software training.
• Student Job Search Preparation Help: RoboJackets alumni are the best resource for current students who are looking for a job since alumni understand the work that goes into RoboJackets and how to best present that work to potential employers. Students can request help in resume writing, interview preparation, or networking. 
• Alumni Trip Planning Mentorship / Assistance: The logistics of trips that RoboJackets makes can be daunting for students as they are trying to wrap up their work on projects for competition. Students are responsible for planning the trip, but alumni have experience and insight that students may be lacking. This service provides alumni mentors who can provide leaders with feedback on the many aspects of planning a successful trip. 

Projects:

• Alumni-Support Leadership Retreat: The RoboJackets leadership retreat is an opportunity for student leaders to connect with each other and reflect on the challenges of leadership and the future of RoboJackets. This project is aimed at providing volunteers who can facilitate the discussions and execution of the annual retreat. Alumni volunteers would only help when requested and would only assist with activities that could not be well executed by the new RoboJackets leadership.
• Alumni Newsletter Writing: If you are reading this newsletter, you already know what this is about. This newsletter is meant to keep alumni or current students like you informed about what exciting things are going on in the world of RoboJackets. This ongoing effort is managed by the current student leadership, but (almost) all the articles are written by alumni, like this one. If you want to know more about the newsletter’s history, check out this article from a prior issue.

This month, we have another alumni we’d like to spotlight: Ryo Osawa. Ryo was at Georgia Tech between 2011 and 2015, and graduated with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering. During his time at RoboJackets, he was chiefly involved with the RoboCup electrical team. This team is responsible for some of the most complex printed circuit board (PCB) designs in RoboJackets. Ryo is known in the organization as someone with a great deal of knowledge on everything electrical design.

Ryo is currently located in Atlanta, GA. He works at Salesforce as an Urgent Night-Time Support Engineer covering for the Japan & Korea region. In his spare time, Ryo enjoys Japanese animation, VTuber streams, and playing Factorio, a factory simulation game. He also continues to pursue PCB design as a hobby after his time at RoboJackets.

Ryo learned several lessons from his time at RoboJackets. He had a few he thought were worth mentioning. The first was the technical area he dedicated most of his time to: PCB design. Ryo says, “this became my primary job for the first 5 years of my career after graduating; it still likely will be a lifelong hobby.” He also mentions problem solving, troubleshooting and debugging: “The ability to use the right set of tools and skills to identify, break down, and eventually solve a problem is ultimately what is in demand in any industry; RoboJackets provided a great environment (location, tools, people, etc.) to rapidly build, test, and refine designs.” The final thing he mentioned he got out of RoboJackets isn’t a lesson per se, but friends he met during his time with the club: “many of the closest ties I have to this day are with people I met through RoboJackets.”

Finally, as usual, we wanted to ask Ryo what his favorite memories from RoboJackets are. He had two he wanted to share. The first is a competition repair story involving using a metal file to fix an essential electrical component:

We had a board that had an essential component, the field programmable gate array (FPGA), replaced multiple times. With the thermal stress applied each operation, a critical pad was eventually ripped out. To remedy the situation, we soldered on a jumper wire directly from the FPGA to the corresponding pin on the connector it was meant to connect to.

After a match, the hanging FPGA pin (only soldered to a jumper wire) broke off of the chip. We eventually ran out of backup boards, so we had a choice between one fewer robot on the field vs somehow recovering this board. Since the pin was already broken, there was no viable soldering point other than directly to the lead frame (the metal structure inside a chip package that carries signals from the die to the external pins). Unfortunately, we didn’t have any tools on hand that could sand down the chip’s plastic casing to get to the lead frame. A fellow team happened to have a set, and they were willing to lend it to us (in exchange they wanted a lot of their motors fixed). After fulfilling our end of the deal, we got the tool and filed down the top plastic layer near the broken pin, reached the lead frame, and soldered the jumper there. The happy conclusion: We successfully got another bot on the field.

The other is a much shorter story. The electrical team was performing stress testing on the kicker system that includes charging a large bank of capacitors up to ~250V to rapidly discharge and kick the ball that RoboCup uses. Ryo recalls one instance when, during some of these tests, small resistors were hooked up as the load instead. The load resistors were sacrificial, and the test created a good number of ~50k ohm resistors from 1 ohm resistors.

This September, RoboJackets will be participating in our first entry of evGrand Prix Autonomous, the go-kart scaled autonomous racing competition. Even though this might be the first time at EVGP, the RoboRacing team has acquired autonomous racing experience over eight years of competition in the likes of IARRC and Sparkfun AVC. The experience brings with it the understanding (and frustration) that things won’t always go as planned. This has led RoboJackets to have a heavy influence in the planning of the competition, with a focus on safety and control.

The evGrand Prix competition was started in 2009 at Purdue University with the focus on manual electric go-kart racing. The competition has since grown over the years in participants and in scope with the introduction of the Autonomous division in 2018. This division has many of the same goals as the original but with the added twist of the go-karts having to drive themselves! With the cancellation of Sparkfun AVC (which served as a large car competition) after the 2018 season, RoboRacing coincidently found themselves looking at evGrand Prix as the next larger vehicle project just as the autonomous division was taking off.

Rules existed for the EVGP Autonomous division, covering topics such as platform requirements and safety, but they seemed to be missing aspects that accounted for the lack of a human driver sitting in the seat, who acts as a final failsafe in the event of malfunction. This lack of a human driver presents important safety concerns that are not as easily handled, such as the car driving uncontrollably at a wall many yards away. With the team’s previous competition experience, this is not a far-fetched situation. Additional complications are that these are approximately 200 lbs robots that could go upwards of 30 mph and the goal is to have multiple cars on the track at once! 

RoboRacing set out to propose a safety and control system to try to account for these aspects, championed by the electrical and software subteam members over the past two years. The first component is the Team Safety Remote. This wireless radio remote is designed to turn off motors and apply emergency braking and is to be used by the teams if they identify a loss of control. The next component is the Master Safety Remote. This wireless radio remote is similar to the Team Safety remote, but it is to be used by the competition officials. Both of these remotes provide a hardware level redundant safety control with a focus on simplicity.

The final piece of the proposal is the Race Control System. This system provides high-level race management of the go-karts. Each kart follows a predefined state machine that mirrors the use case in the competition, from being in the garage to finishing the race. Each state has specific requirements such as how soon the kart should be ready to drive and when the kart should stop to reduce unexpected behaviors. It is designed to be used over a wireless network, relying on TCP connections between the karts and a central computer. Brian Cochran, a RoboRacing alumni, has helped develop a cross-platform open source GUI to manage the race to be run on the central computer. The interface allows the management of each individual kart and overall race status, similar to racing flags in F1 or NASCAR. For example, using the green flag in a race indicates the start of competition with our GUI having a direct parallel of the “GREEN_GREEN;” state. You can check out the project for yourself on GitHub, where you can find the GUI software and full proposal! You can also check out a video of the GUI in action on YouTube!

Outside of the safety and control system proposal, the team has taken part in many discussions with the competition officials and the other participating schools. We have worked through ideas such as AprilTags (like a barcode for robots) for improved kart detection, a unified network configuration, and even race track changes. Overall, the team is excited to see how the 2021 evGrand Prix will play out and can’t wait to learn and improve both the karts and competition for next year!