Roxy

             The new year means setting up for success, including organizing our Pit, managing operations, and handling new material shipments. Our shop manager, Ellery Han, has been cleaning the Pit and delegating tasks to sort last year's parts, screws, and miscellaneous items. A well-organized Pit is crucial for efficiency. With packages arriving nonstop, we order early to avoid delays and ensure we have everything needed for the Fall and Build Seasons. Students help sort and take inventory, ensuring each subteam knows what materials are available for their projects.              The operations subteam, in which all members are required to contribute at least 4 hours of admin tasks and additional upkeep work, is led by our new operations director, Claire Mayder. She’s been training new students and leads, applying for grants, and more. Our new communications lead, Jahnvi Bheemarasetti, assists Claire.              Our team fundraises the majority of its money in the Fall Season, this includes receiving money from sponsors such as the Wild Cat Foundation–our school foundation that raises money for school-related activities. Big thanks to them as well as all of our other sponsors! We’ve also had significant work done in documentation for operations to ensure efficiency in the build season and [...]

             This is the third year we have worked on the vision project. In the 2022-2023 season, we started the project and wrote code for pose estimation using April Tags. In 2023-2024, we mostly focused on improving the accuracy of our pose estimation, but we also started working on object detection. Our pose estimation was accurate enough to shoot into the speaker by the competition, but our object detection was not functional enough to use the competition.              This year, we are mostly focusing on object detection. The first step is imaging the Jetson Orin Nano that we plan to use since we currently need help finding the one we used last year. We encountered several problems imaging it and installing all of the necessary libraries, but we eventually finished. Our code runs but gets about 7 or 8 frames per second. We are currently trying to improve our framerate, and then we plan to mount a camera on our test robot to create and tune an algorithm to help the driver intake a game piece.              We are also training a practice model. Since FIRST released that there will be two different game pieces next year, we decided to use cones and cubes [...]