May 11, 2022 - PM Introductory Meeting

History

• Team aims to develop hardware to compete in URC (university rover challenge)

  • Rover must complete following missions

    • Extreme Retrieval and Delivery: Rover must be teleoperated in a 1km range to retrieve various objects and bring them back to the starting area. Mission requires long range telecommunications, live stream camera feeds, strong vision systems to provide information for operators, a robust mobile platform (what we to refer to as our drivetrain) to traverse terrain and small obstacles, and a robotic arm to interact with the environment

    • Equipment Servicing: Similar to the mission above, but robot must use its arm with greater precision / accuracy to complete fine manipulation tasks in a smaller competition area.

    • Science: Rover must traverse a smaller testing area, collect various dirt samples and test them on-board for signs of life (ninhydrin chemical tests to determine presence of amino acids, collect data on soil moisture, CO2 and nitrogren).

    • Autonomy: Rover must operate completely autonomously and traverse to various rough GPS coordinates. Upon reaching these coordinates, they need to identify QR code markers that make up “goal posts” in the area, and traverse through these goal posts.

    • Historical team performance:

  • Team has not gone to competition in quite some time. URC has been cancelled since the start of COVID.

  • We have qualified for SAR in 2020 and 2021, and did not submit a deliverable in 2022

    • SAR is a 5min video showcasing the features of the rover. This determines if you get an invitation to the competition, as you must score within top 36 teams to get an invitation to the finals

  • We qualified for and attended URC in 2019

• Historically team has not had a dedicated PM

• Team lead would communicate with subteam leads to define goals, desired project, and term scope

• Leadership has historically been incredibly shaky. Team leads have been cycled on a term by term basis, with individuals becoming team lead, then promptly exiting the team to focus on other work

• Huge loss of knowledge transfer in both technical skills and project management has led to numerous issues

• In the middle of 2021 the team decided to rebuild their hardware from the ground up

  • This is why we did not submit a deliverable in 2022, our new hardware was not completed on time. Designing a new rover has an incredibly large scope, and we did not leverage knowledge from past years. This has been a fantastic learning experience for all involved but we are lagging at the moment.

  • We are currently working on finishing the development / beginning the testing of these new systems, and are intending to use these as a strong foundation for future builds and development (instead of scrapping past hardware)

• I am gapped pretty hard in knowledge for stuff that is not hardware related lol

• Need help with estimating realistic timelines for milestones and key goals. There

• Need help defining realistic term scopes based on historical team pacing and current team resources

• Need help aligning available resources with top priorities to get real tangible work done

  • Developing and defining a strong singular focus may be more useful than going “wide” with our work

• better internal organization should be a large focus moving forward