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Officers
- President: Chris Atwood (catwood)
- President: Steven Shamlian (sshamlia)
- Treasurer: Richard Juchniewicz (rjuchnie)
- Tech Guru: Prasanna Velagapudi (pkv)
- Public Relations: Katherine Killfoile (kkillfoi)
- Intel Liason: Chris Hoffman (choffma)
Projects
- Colony || - Pix (led by Steven Shamlian — list other members here)
- Battlebots - Pix (led by Victor Soto — list other members here)
- ROV (led by Mike Kowalski — list other members here)
- Fun With Robots
Awards/etc
- Colony published a paper in National Conference on Undergraduate Research
- Colony also got an award from Lockheed Martin
- Battlebots won 3rd place and got “Best Engineered”
- MOBOT Judge’s Choice, Open Class, for Pikachu, by John Palmisano
Other Information/Notes
Gallery
From Steve:
The school year began with relocation due to increased Red Team activity. The summer involved talks between Red Team (Spencer Spiker, Alex Gutierrez, Michele Gittleman) and Roboclub officers and past officers (Chris Atwood, Tom Lauwers, Jonathan Hurst, and more) to decide fair space options for the Robotics Club. In previous years, the club had expanded from one room in the PRB into nearly 2/3 of the highbay to support growing membership, more tools, and ever more robots. Despite negotiations, the club was asked to vacate the PRB highbay in exchange for storage space in the catacombs (NSH C-level) and a FMS trailer on the hill overlooking the PRB. This situation was less than satisfactory for the club and its members, and the first three months of the school year were spent moving and re-organizing the club’s base of operations. Despite this setback, the club pursued some very successful projects: Colony ][, Battlebots IQ, and ROV (described later).
In September 2004, Bill Gates gifted $20M to CMU for the construction of the Gates Building to ease the space crunch in SCS and RI. It was quickly realized by the officers of the robotics club (at this point, Chris, Steve, Rich, and Pras) that the PRB would soon no longer be part of campus, and Steve began meetings to secure a permanent space for the Robotics Club. Meetings with Matt Mason (director of RI), Red Whittaker (director of FRC), Jim Skees (space overlord for Wean and NSH), and others to find a solution, but no decisions were reached. Nearing the end of the fall semester, the officers were worried about the future of the robotics club. Spring semester brought answers, but from an unexpected source.
Somewhere between F04 and S05, Rich heard that there would be a meeting to discuss the displacement of clubs in the proposed footprint of the West Campus improvements (PRB, PPB, OSC, garages). The original plan by the school was to renovate the space along the loading ramp to the basement in the east campus garage. However, upon further investigation it turned out that it was not “feasible” (against the city fire codes). Ultimately, the plans were changed in to reclomating the unused parts of the UC basement into viable commercial and student real estate. After many meetings with Student Activities ironing out the finer points of the club’s with free food we were finally given the ok to move into our new space in late Janurary 2006. It seems that Student Activities was genuinely interested in accomodating the club; eventually, it was decided that the club would move to a new buildout of the University Center’s lower level. Kate drove quite a lot of this discussion by S05.
It would be good if Kate could add some here.
