DRC has been very busy since FDOC! Post-comp our primary goal was to unpack from comp and then fully reorganize our room.
Unpacking
A few dedicated members took the initiative and fully unpacked everything extremely fast! Crush and Oogway survived the voyage across the country fully unscathed, so we could not be more pleased! In terms of tools, everything we brought to competition was what we generally used around the room so we knew some reorganization was in order once we saw how much stuff was lying around.
Cleaning
We had A LOT of junk. Heaps of spare parts accumulated over time and took up most of the space in our room. We proceeded to engage in a flurry of donations to our beloved foundry!
Notable finds in the junk were:
- Drone parts?
- An old (failed) minibot project
- Caulk guns galore
- A Current master’s student’s project from freshman year.
Needless to say, we got rid of a ton of stuff. To put the cherry on top, we moved around our tables and made a lot of space around the room! We are all very happy with the state of the room (check it out!).
Recruitment
Post-cleaning we now faced our greatest challenge yet: recruiting freshmen. We had over 100 email-list signups at the club fair and Pratt fair, so we were anticipating a lot of interest in our club! Unfortunately, our first interesting meeting was on a miserable rainy day, so attendance was sparse. Our second interest meeting however had a lot of more attendance!
Onboarding
(Subteam onboarding updates)
Now that we had the freshman within our grasp, we were ready to onboard them. On our first onboarding meeting, we had over 40 young bucks come looking for some good ol’ robotics. We did not disappoint. More and more new members started flowing in during our proceeding meetings, bringing the total of interested new members probably closer to 60!
Mechanical:
Raine and Niko (Me!) have been categorizing all of our potential projects for our new members. Notably, we are looking to have a new marker dropper, add 2 more thrusters to crush, and redesign Crush’s electronics capsules. Two hot-ticket items we want to work on are a robot gripper and a hydrodynamic case for crush, but we are waiting a little bit to allocate those so we can formulate a concrete plan.
Electrical:
Sid and Jill have completed onboarding, meaning that all the new electrical members have proficient soldering KiCad, and Arduino skills! Projects are being assigned now: some members are working on new ESC PCBs, some are doing electrical reliability fixes, and some are creating our electrical stack on a board. We have a lot of new exciting ideas to improve our electrical stack this year, including temperature/humidity control and consolidating our stack into more space-efficient custom PCBs!
CS:
Thanks to Avrick (CV Lead) for leading onboarding, and to Srinath (CV Lead) and Hung (President emeritus) for helping out. All new CS members have now completed the fabled TurtleSim, and won some t-shirts along the way. This last meeting, Nathanael (CS Lead) split up everyone into projects based on their interests, with some hoping to get sonar working more reliably, others fine-tuning and updating our Foxglove GUI, and one more group characterizing the Jetson Nano on Crush with the goal of alleviating performance bottlenecks and fully utilizing the GPU to run more advanced CV models. The rest of the team has also started on their projects, and pool testing is already in full swing (check out our latest pool test update next!). The CS train has started, and ain’t nothing getting our way!
Get HYPED For Duke Robotics Club at Robosub 2026; We are very excited about this year!