It’s been a long semester! Now that we’re all done it’s time to take a step back and recap all of our accomplishments this semester! Also, congratulations to all for finishing exams; happy holidays and happy new year!
Mechanical progress
Mechanical has been busy! Take a peep at what we’ve been working on!
Torpedoes were very successful at comp, but we wanted to make them more compact and robust. Raine executed the plan; now torpedoes are easier to replace and stick out less so they won’t get snagged on any doorways :).
Marker dropper was something we ran in the 2024 competition (on Oogway), but omitted in 2025. We want to bring it back for 2026, so Michelle has been working on a far more compact version that we can put on Crush! This version uses a paddle mechanism to dispense our markers and we will be testing it ASAP next semester.
Crush Eight Thrusters: Raine reconfigured crush so now instead of six thrusters, Crush has eight! This enables pitch control, and with some clever use of plastics, the eight thruster configuration is the same mass as the six thruster config!
Oogway Reliability Multiple members have been working on improving Oogway’s mechanical parts. I (Niko) redid the battery cable to use no connectors, and hard wired from the battery capsule to the main capsule. This change removed multiple points of failure that hindered us at comp. Ivan has improved the battery capsule holder to be more robust, and Parker has been working on a new in-capsule battery holder. All of these changes will ensure Oogway just works at comp and has no mechanical failures.
Case: My big project has been to design a case for Crush! The case will go around the capsules and also contain all of the buoyancy. Bumjoon and Suhanni are working on modeling buoyancy, and we hope to mill out the foam in the first two weeks of next semester. The first prototype will be 3D printed, but we plan for the second one to be Carbon fiber or fiber glass!
Other Projects: Ian and Jose have been working on a robotic claw to complete the octagon task, and have one prototype complete! Pierson has been working on redesigning the battery Capsule for crush too!
Looking forward: The biggest ticket item for next semester is to finish the case on crush! After that we want to start researching and maybe even designing a new robot
Electrical progress
This semester, the electrical team has made substantial progress in improving the reliability, robustness, and maintainability of our robots’ electrical systems. A major focus has been redesigning Oogway’s battery capsule and power system to be safer and more organized. We also replaced or reworked several previously unreliable sensors and cameras, so Oogway would be reliably working for pool tests and ready to pre-qual next semester.
On Crush, we now have eight thrusters, all of which are fully integrated and functioning electrically. To support this, we had the freshmen develop a complete, self-contained benchtop electrical stack on a single board for Crush, consolidating what used to be a collection of ad hoc wiring into a more structured and reproducible system. This has already made testing and troubleshooting significantly more straightforward.
Looking ahead, we have begun designing custom PCBs for both the power stack and the signal stack. These boards are intended to improve reliability, reduce wiring complexity, and make debugging easier by clearly separating high-power and low-voltage signal domains. They will also improve space efficiency inside the hulls, freeing up room for additional sensors and future upgrades. Overall, the electrical work completed this semester lays a strong foundation for more advanced functionality like a marker dropper and smoother integration through PCBs in the upcoming semester.
CS Progress
CS has been busy! We started with cleaning up comp code. This also included a refactor of our task-planning code to have a “base task” to maintain behavioral consistency across robots and tasks, making it a lot easier to create new tasks and make necessary adjustments when mechanical/electrical touches the robot.
First is integrating sonar to have a backup for CV for detecting objects, and a much more reliable way to get normal to an object. We hope this will help us align better for tasks like torpedoes. Second, we’ve also cleaned up a bunch of Foxglove code, and made it robot-agnostic. Last year, when we were building Crush, we focused a lot on writing the competition code for Crush and making it robot-agnostic, and this year we brought up the other piece of the equation, Foxglove, to match that coding paradigm. Moving forward, we hope the testing workflow using Foxglove for both robots is going to look a lot more similar, and it is easier to make changes. Finally, we’ve also been working on running our YOLOv7-tiny model on the Jetson Nano, so we can run our supervised models on Crush, enabling Crush to complete a wider variety of tasks.
Moving forward, we want to do more testing and refinement of our new code, then we hope to lock into competition mode after the first team time, where our future path will be determined by what is revealed then.
Other news
We had a Lego-building social this semester which was lots of fun!
A big thank you to all of our members for working hard this semester! I am hyped for next semester and can’t wait to get ready for comp! Stay tuned for updates on our comp readiness, but for the time being: