The Beginning

This project has existed for numerous years, though this year (2019-20) is the first known instance where a standardized GitHub group has been created and organized through Agile strategies.

Up to two years before this (2017), the robot was based on an Arudino platform with numerous individual motor controllers. This resulted in an overly complicated system, and numerous EE's were required to do work on the motors and controllers.

The culmination of the group in 2018-19 was to switch to a Nvidia Jetson TX2 controller platform over WiFi. Motor controllers were based on the Vex platform, using Talon SRX-style "MotionMagic" libraries. This allows phy-layer communications over USB CAN bus. From here, you can use the "MotionMagic" libraries to read rotary magnetic encoder speeds, current draw, and other relevant information from the motors, and also to control their motion, speed, etc.

This is rather useful for considering the strength and resistance of digging and movement in the rover.

However, not everything was perfect. Non-standard networking and socket programming is abound, and - while an XBox Controller interface does exist - it's rather inexact and build configurations were unknown. Documentation is essentially non-existent.

A New Saga (2019-20)

This brings us to the modern era. For the 2020 competition, NASA reduced the maximum size of the robot by essentially half. So, numerous physical changes are potentially inbound; though, the software platform is expected to stay the same on the Jetson platform.

The primary goal of this year is threefold: address the changing platform, standardize documentation and build configurations (Premake, Github, Readme's, etc), and to add Autonomous support for the robot through OpenCV.