It is once again time for robotics — as of this week, the club has resumed in full. After seeing immense success last year, we plan to keep the same foundation while making improvements to work out some pain points and inefficiencies we experienced in the past. These improvements are myriad, spanning from the educational division to management.
For one, we’ve optimized how we teach and run the program. Instead of alternating between teaching electronics and CAD to two different groups, we are now able to teach to the whole class at once, enabled by the ability to run Autodesk Fusion on Chromebooks. Further, we’ve refocused on the importance of CAD and advanced concepts for bot design, scaling back electronics education to only 1 week. We’ve upgraded our component selection and are giving returning PLANT members more flexibility in their designs. In addition, we plan to run more in-house competitions later in the year so that members can refine designs, while potentially also allowing them to attend extra competitions elsewhere.
On the management side, we’ve clarified certain roles and are a bit more organized — for example, working on a 15lb bot doesn’t necessarily mean that you are a manager, and vice versa. We plan to continue to educate members such that there can be a smooth transition when management members end up graduating. For the foreseeable future of the next few months, robotics will mostly just be education. Since we aren’t building new 15lb bots, we don’t have to worry about working on them for some time. With that said, we wish the best of luck to everyone in robotics and once again wish to thank our sponsors who continue to fund our materials, electronics, machining, and competition trips!