Slugbotics is a student-led team at UC Santa Cruz that offers students the chance to engage in international engineering competitions and pursue their own robotics projects.
MATE: Underwater Robotics
MATE is our oldest subteam, focusing on creating an ROV that goes underwater to complete tasks simulating deep-sea marine research. MATE teaches students CAD, embedded systems programming, EDA, and other mechanical, electrical, and software skills required to create the ROV. Your donation to this subteam would be used to prototype new solutions and create a better ROV this year. This year, MATE aims to spend $2,000.
Combat Robotics
This Combat Robotics subteam was born as a result of our love for Battle Bots. Our main team bot, Record Scratch, has achieved second place for two consecutive years at the UCLA Smackdown Competition and also secured victory this summer at the Bay Area Robotics Competition. The Combat Robotics subteam teaches new members different mechanical designs of bots, 3D printing, CAD, and more! Throughout the summer, our team diligently worked on a new bot project, slated to become a hammersaw by year-end. Additionally, we hold weekly workshops where new members can create their own plastic bots with the guidance of experienced senior teammates. At the beginning of next year, we plan to host a competition here at UC Santa Cruz for our workshop members. Combat Robotics needs $3,000 this year, as we have grown significantly in the past two years. We have 50 new members in this team, making it the biggest subteam of Slugbotics.
SOMARS: Drone Research
SOMARS is our aerial vehicle research subteam. We focus on studying aerial vehicles in all forms, including drones, UAVs, and even larger concepts like eVTOL aircraft. We are pursuing the CITRIS 2023 Aviation Prize, where we integrate eVTOL transport that enables people to travel between UC campuses (UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Merced). This will involve programming flight control and scheduling software, proposing new and novel infrastructure to all four campuses, and developing the tools to analyze and build our proposal. We have worked with many professors, including CITRIS Executive Director Michael Matkin, Professor Ricardo Sanfelice, and Professor Steve McGuire. SOMAR’s cost estimate for this year is $415.
F1Tenth: Autonomous Racing
F1Tenth works with pathfinding, SLAM, object detection, and collision avoidance machine learning models to race an autonomous RC car around a track. The team teaches new members LIDAR computer vision using Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2). Our development environment uses Python, C++, Ubuntu, and Docker to simulate vehicle movement. F1Tenth is a heavily research-focused subteam that will take advantage of the numerous papers related to F1Tenth pathing and automation. We aim to compete in the official F1Tenth competition in spring 2024. The subteam expects to spend $360 this year.
Arm Team: Robotic Arm Research
Arm Team aims to create a robotic arm assistant that responds to human speech and, later, research possibilities of controlling the arm using a brain-computer interface. The hardware team is building a custom six-DOF robotic arm, and the software team is working to combine NLP, computer vision, and reinforcement learning in an intelligent robotic system. Members use various tools such as CAD, AI algorithms, ROS, and Gazebo Simulator, as well as drawing from novel robotics research. Arm Team hopes to purchase a variety of sensors, servers, and a brain-computer interface to further their research, which will cost about $4,000.
Our goal is $9,000
to support our subteams in achieving their goals and succeeding in their endeavors!
Your donation, of any size, helps us pay for competition fees, travel expenses, and parts for our projects. By contributing, you’ll play a vital role in empowering our team to excel and make a significant impact in the field of robotics.
