MASLAB 2024 Wiki

We will post links to resources and announcements here.

Ground Rules

See course expectations. Please treat the lab space, course staff, EDS staff, and materials with respect.

DO NOT TAKE ANY MATERIALS FROM THE LAB THAT ARE NOT IN THE MASLAB AREA (IF IN DOUBT ASK A STAFF)
You are free to take your kits home, BUT DO NOT LOSE EXPENSIVE ITEMS!
DO NOT USE ANY TOOL IN EDS/LAB IF YOU ARE NOT TRAINED (USE DISCRETION)
NO FOOD IN 38-500 PLEASE EAT OUTSIDE
ABSOLUTELY NO PAINTING
Be good neighbors!
NO PAINTING!!!

Announcements

January 17 - Reminder: mock competition Friday at 1PM. We will be finalizing the bracket tomorrow. We will host late lab hours (until 9pm or students leave) Thursday in 38-500 for teams that wish to practice on the field or seed for competition.

We have a number of exciting guest talks lined up for you all the third week of IAP. They will be posted to the calendar. Up first Monday at 10am in 32-141 is a talk from Dave Otten about Micromouse. You may have seen the recent Veritasium video (in which Dave appears). Personally, I am super stoked. We will try to cater some light refreshments.

The talks while not mandatory are a great way to take a break from the robot and learn something cool. The speakers are volunteering their time so please come and ask questions! We are trying to schedule a few speakers from industry as well, but these may need to be in the evenings due to 9-5 work hours.

Teams looking for IMUs and range finders (IR or laser). They are coming and should be here for week 3. If you dig through the miscellanous parts bin we may also have some leftover.

January 16 - Congratulations on all your hard work so far. If you are finished with basic autonomy/CV with the Kitbot then the rest of IAP is an open ended exercise with your team to try to build the best robot you can for the final competition on Feb 2. We encourage teams to explore online resources. The competition aspect of MASLAB is meant to be a self-directed learning experience. Of course as staff we are also here to support you.

A few key updates:

Friday Jan 19 will be another mock competition in the afternoon starting at 1:30pm. Be ready to compete! We will post the bracket soon.
There will be a number of guest talks given by folks from industry, profs, etc. in the coming weeks. Jan 24 at 10am in 32-141 will feature a Guest Talk by Prof. Luca Carlone of MIT AeroAstro.
If you wish to seed for the competition, grab a staff member and we will set up a mock round and record your highest score (you can try to seed as many times as you like)
We will be sending out an email regarding t-shirt sizes and dates for the sponsor dinner, which will take place either Wed or Thu the week of competition in the evening. We will have a few sponsors visiting so it is a great time to show off your robots.

Finally, a reminder that a team page/final report will be required to enter the final competition. Keep it up & see you in lab!

January 10 - Teams that have not picked a team name yet. Do so by noon of Wednesday!

For those still working on their kitbots, keep pushing. Do not hesitate to ask staff for help during lab hours. Aim to have your kitbot completed by Thursday end of day.

For all teams, please put your intended milestones on your team pages. We will start scheduling staff design reviews and check-ins next week. At this point you should start seriously planning strategy and prototyping mechanisms (see these videos for inspiration).

You should be creating your own ROS2 packages for your robot or building off of the kitware packages. Try to make your first commit by end of day Wednesday. I noticed a few repos that have the colcon build generated files (install, build, log) pushed to MITHub. These you should add to the .gitignore since it is best practice not to commit temporary build files. Ask a staff member if you are confused.

Finally, for those that are still getting used to the terminal and Linux, this is a set of excellent videos on modern C++ that goes over some very useful terminal commands in the first video.

The extra floor mats are coming on Wednesday so expect the game field to grow. This is another reminder to take off your shoes when you go on the game field lest you incur a 10-second penalty for your team!! The scoring system has also been added to the wiki rules and two example center platforms have been kindly built and assembled by Brian for you to check out.

Delegating work is a great way to increase productivity. Remember to get some rest as well, MASLAB is a marathon-sprint. Don't burn out week one!!

January 9 - Congrats. You have all made it through Day One of MASLAB!

Great progress today. Keep up the good work. One thing to be mindful of as we go forward is returning communal tools (the snap ring pliers, the wire strippers, screw drivers) to the round staff table when you are done with them.

Tomorrow we will meet directly in lab 38-500 to continue working on your kitbots. For those still working on the assembly, keep going! For teams finished with the basic driving. You should start thinking about computer vision. A good place to start is the CV examples (prepared by Noah Moroze) on the MASLAB github. Read the readme carefully and take a look through the slides. Grab a staff to discuss if you have any questions.

HW: Come up with a kickass team name and start putting some photos/gifs on your webpages. And if you haven't shared your Onshape folders with maslab-2024-staff@mit.edu please do.

Now is the best time to start thinking about strategy in parallel. Set up some realistic milestones to keep your team on track! We will review these with you at the start of next week.

PS You can embed images that have been uploaded in Markdown on your teampages (see Team 5 and Team 2 for examples). We recommend imgur/drive/dropbox for uploading images. There will be a prize for best team page at the end. It also helps to serve as a fun record of your progress!

January 8 - MASLAB officially begins Monday at 10am in 32-141. We will do a quick roll call and set ground rules for working in the lab.Then we will migrate to the lab 38-500 to get all of the teams their kits.

At least three team members will need to be present to sign the team material agreement in the case of damaged or lost materials (this is only precautionary, if you are responsible with your stuff we won't need to ever see this form again). We will go over this in the ground rules. If you do not have at least three teammates present you will need to get a verbal confirmation over zoom/phone.

The agenda for day one will be to get your kitbots assembled and running. We will be in lab most days 10am-5pm with an hour break at noon for lunch. Expect a mock competition this Friday Jan 12 to get a sense for how hard it is to score points. We have set up a competition field in 38-500. DO NOT STEP ON THE FIELD WITHOUT FIRST REMOVING YOUR SHOES!!!!

January 1 - Welcome teams! Please take a moment to find your team page and update it according to the instructions here. Note that currently each team page is populated with just the team number and the members from the sign up sheet. If you notice any problems or cannot edit your team page please email maslab-2024-staff@mit.edu.

The official start of the IAP activity is Jan 8. Before then, we highly encourage that teams work through the three tutorials posted on the wiki:

The goal is to have your kitbots finished and driving on day one by the end of open lab hours at 5pm. Finishing the tutorials will help your teams in this endeavour.

Here is what to expect on Day One. We will meet promptly at 10am on Jan 8 in Room 32-141. We will do a quick intro then migrate to the 38-500 lab space at 11am. There we will go through the kitbot assembly, parts, and programming in detail. One set of team members will need to work on the design of the top plate and queue up in EDS for training to use the laser cutter to cut out their top plate. We suggest the rest of the team work on strategy, cultivating team spirit, wiring, and programming of the kitbot, etc. There will be open lab hours in the afternoon from 1pm-5pm in 38-500.