The Corporate Affiliates Program (CAP) held a board meeting on the evening of February 13th, where executives from partner companies as well as UCSD faculty members can receive updates on the Jacobs School of Engineering and progress of student organizations. Not only does this serve as an opportunity for student organizations to showcase their projects, but additionally students are able to network directly with members from industry.

As one of the student project teams in attendance, Triton UAS had on display our full plane, 2-axis camera gimbal, unmanned ground vehicle (UGV), software demo of our saliency program for detecting targets using a RCNN object detection algorithm and You Only Look Once (YOLO), informational brochures, and a brand-new poster printed by CAP. Our team was able to talk to C-level executives about our project, including representatives from Qimia, Bentley, Brain Corp., Solar Turbines, General Atomics, Lytx, as well as UCSD faculty members.

Subteam leads Jessica Chan, José Orozco, Emmeryn Gelblicht, and Garrett Gibo (left to right) showcasing the Triton UAS table (Photo by Justin Sun)


We also got to directly update John Black, Brain Corp’s Senior Vice President of New Product Development, of our progress on our project. After hearing about the progress on the UGV, John Black suggested that we look into Throwbot from ReconRobotics in Minnesota for the UGV. The Throwbot is a throwable robot normally used for military reconnaissance. The design has two wheels and a body that is smaller than the wheels and a “tail” for throwing and dragging behind the vehicle for stability. Its wheels are spiked and made with flexible material to give it all-terrain movement. We can improve our own UGV by drawing inspiration from these design choices.

Our team greatly enjoyed talking about our project to the meeting attendees. We are looking forward to getting involved in any future opportunities that allows us to present the hard work we have put forward into our project. We also want to give a big thank you to Dean Al Pisano who hosted this meeting, Wil Dyer the Director of the Corporate Affiliates Program, Rocio de Lis from CAP, and Caitlyn Liu from TESC for providing us the opportunity to table at this event.