Meeting with the Senior Solutions Architect from AWS

By Jai, Anuhya, Fernando, Ren, Nalin, and Sol

Today, we had a meeting with a Senior Solutions Architect from AWS to receive advice mainly on our software and presentation skills. We discussed how to make better use of our Limelight camera, how we do automated robot movements, and our autonomous movement. We shared the capabilities of the Limelight and how it does not take up too much energy from our robot to compute colors and sense distance. We brainstormed ideas on how to use the ping pong capabilities to see where the robot is on the field. We also talked about how we can use the camera to make our robot oriented towards samples of the correct color making it easier to pick them up from the highly randomized submersible. Another aspect of our code that we shared were our different articulations describing how with the click of a button our robot can do several things. Our mentor complemented us on the use of these articulations as they are efficient and make driving much easier. As always, since our ultimate goal is to make a match fully autonomous, these articulations help us move a step towards our goal since it tries to minimize how the robot scores and uses its arms. The last software thing we talked about was our robot’s autonomous period. We started off by discussing how our auton has been relatively relevant throughout this season but also simple. Together, we came up with some goals for our auton period. We want to be able to score four yellow samples in the high basket as well as go to the submersible for more. Also, we want to start implementing an auton period to score specimens on the high rung.

We briefly talked about our current robot as well as the future swerve chassis version. Focusing on the software aspect, we showed off how we put color sensors in both our sample and specimen intake to make it easier on the driver. We then discussed our presentation skills talking about how to make our team seem more cohesive and more engaged throughout the whole presentation. Our mentor talked about how we should all contribute more to each part of the presentation which would help our team seem more spirited and focused on the presentations. He also told us to speak more clearly as well as making sure to emphasize specific points while we speak too. We got compliments on how our presentation was made specific to the audience and how we gave enough build and engineering information to allow him to understand how our software works.

We gained a lot of amazing feedback and had a lot of different conversations to help ideate the software side of our robot. We thank our mentor and can not wait to meet with him again!