Aerin Brown

Rover Software Lead @Mcgill Robotics

Montreal, QC, CA

As Rover Software Lead of the McGill Robotics Team, I oversee the division responsible for developing the Python library that manages manual and automated navigation of difficult terrain and precise manipulation of the robotic arm on our Mars rover. My team\'s work let us earn 3rd place in the Traversal task of the Canadian International Rover Challenge. To mobilize my team, I have weekly meetings with fellow leads and my team of 33 programmers. I also manage documentation, facilitate sharing of knowledge amongst the team, and arrange opportunities to learn from alumni and other industry experts. Over my time on the team, we have achieved a wide number of goals, including:• Developing a robust human control interface for a four-wheel drive and an arm with five degrees of freedom.• Processing and labelling over 200 images and trained a YOLO machine learning model to recognize interactable objects. • Integrating a TEB path planning package into an RViz simulation to efficiently tune and test its efficacy for our rover.At present, our goal is to translate our previous work from ROS 1 to ROS 2.To earn this role, I made significant contributions to the team, including:• Securing our repository with a GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline with automated tests to block code-breaking pull requests.• Designing, testing, and documenting custom inverse kinematics and pathfinding algorithms written in Python as part of a team of three, allowing for autonomous operation of a robotic arm with five degrees of motion.• Leading seven programmers on our arm sub-system for one year.