Update 8/30: We won 4th place journal paper and 8th place overall out of 33 teams! Check out the winners or full scoresheet.
In a normal world, we would have been arriving home today after a week of sleepless nights, boatloads of teamwork, and tons of fun in San Diego at RoboSub. But even though the in-person competition was canceled, we still created a journal paper and video for the online component, which we’re really excited to show you now!
This year, we focused on upgrading all aspects of Cthulhu. We also began development on Cthulhu’s successor, which is planned to be unveiled at RoboSub 2021. We’ve meeting virtually all summer, even after the competition was called off, since we’re having fun seeing each other and are making progress towards our goals. And we’re geared up to have an awesome new school year, even through the challenges posed by a mostly virtual fall.
Meeting online was challenging at first with a large team and many lines of work, but we figured out a system that works well for us. The whole team begins in one Zoom call for all-team updates from leadership and any discussions that need to involve everyone. We then break off into separate calls for each subteam, which then further subdivide as needed. Crucially, we post all of the call links in our main Slack channel so that anyone can hop around as needed, which we often do. In addition to Zoom and Slack, Trello, GitHub, and GrabCAD are three other essential tools we’ve been using for collaboration.
We can’t wait to see what the next year will bring, and we’re looking forward to RoboSub 2021!
By, Samuel Rabinowitz, 8/10/2020