No less than 17 passionate and very eager contributors are composing the developer team for the Octanis Rover during this summer. Half of them were already members before, and in total seven students of all backgrounds have joined the project specifically for this very intense final programming, assembly and testing phase. Many of them come every day during the week, some even on weekends, and all of them contributed immensely to the progress of the project.

In an incredibly short amount of time they learned for example how to write so-called nodes for ROS (Robot Operating System), a framework that we are using to fuse IMU, GPS and laser-scan data in order to create a 3D map of the snow surface. Even though it is a very niche piece of software, mostly used by specialists, our team members quickly found their way through the documentation and got a grasp on the essentials of ROS. All pieces of code are synchronized in a team effort via Github.

Programming was however by far not the only occupation during this summer. Be it electronics soldering, mechanical design, printing and assembly, testing of components in the freezer or even just carrying all the material outside to do outdoor driving tests like in the photo below - there was always something to do! Have a look at our Waffle Dashboard with all the different tasks in form of Github issues, of which we completed about 5 - 10 every week.

We hope now to finalize the bulk of the work during the next two weeks. Wish us luck!

This photo was taken behind our lab building, where we usually do outdoor tests. From left to right: Sven, Ricardo, Sofia, Marion, Sam, Joseph, Omar, Alejandra, Raffael. Missing on this photo: Ana, Beat, Eloi, Jeroen, Nawel, Nicolas, Pamela, Quentin.