IEEE Robotics Competition

Overview

I was part of the software team for IEEE UCF’s SoutheastCon 2024 hardware competition robot. The project ran for months and involved building out a full ROS2 software stack for an autonomous robot. I ended up touching almost every part of the system: adding plugins, configuring navigation, fixing transforms, writing custom logic, and keeping the whole stack organized and running. Even though the hardware never fully came together, the software side was a huge learning experience. I spent most of my time building, tuning, debugging, and documenting a system that had a lot of moving parts and needed to work reliably under competition constraints.

What I Worked On

• Added and configured camera, LiDAR, IMU, and encoder plugins in simulation
• Integrated SLAM and Nav2, tuned parameters, and fixed transform issues
• Organized and optimized launch files by splitting them into smaller components
• Implemented watchdog-style logic to kill/restart processes when needed
• Added a waypoint follower and wrote custom plugins to trigger subsystem actions at specific points
• Experimented with different ROS2 communication types to support waypoint-based behaviors
• Added a ball-tracking package and tied it into the navigation pipeline
• Updated URDFs and integrated SolidWorks models for accurate simulation
• Wrote a full bringup script in c++ with structured logger messages
• Documented the entire system for future teams

Results

Key Takeaways

• ROS2 development (nodes, topics, services, actions, parameters, launch files)
• System organization, configuration, and debugging
• Process management and watchdog logic
• Plugin integration and simulation setup
• Reading documentation, tracing issues, and solving problems across a large codebase
• Working in a multi-person software environment with deadlines and constant iteration