Maxwell performing a the Canadian International Rover Challenge

The McMaster Mars Rover Team works to build a rover capable of completing tasks associated with space travel. The team competes annually at the Canadian International Rover Challenge (CIRC) in Drumheller, Alberta

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🤖 Ranked 1st in Canada at CIRC 2023 and 1st in the 2024 CIRC Root Cause Analysis Challenge

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Technical Contributions

As a firmware developer for the team, I designed and wrote firmware for STM32 boards that interfaced with sensors and rover peripherals. Firmware was written to optimize readability and expandability. Notable projects I contributed to were:

• RAD: A custom motor driver board responsible for closed loop stepper control and peripheral communication via CAN and SPI.
• VIPER: A custom Power Distribution Backplane board with monitoring of voltage, current, and power, providing real-time data over CAN to the main computer.
• DMC: An Arduino board producing PWM signals to control peripheral motor controllers and monitoring encoder signals to calculate motor velocity.

RAD PCB (L) and DMC PCB + Black Pill STM32 (R)

I also wrote ROS2 code for our main computer, a Jetson AGX Orin, which interfaced with each of these firmware boards, allowing for remote data collection, health diagnosis, and device configuration.

McMaster Mars Rover Team Projects

Leadership Contributions

As a Co-lead of the software subteam, I had several key roles:

• Hire and train new members, matching their experience with projects to undertake
• Manage tasks being worked on by the team, tasks to complete tasks, and triage immediate issues
• Coordinate with other subteams on rover repairs, requirements for software, and the timelines for delivering hardware for firmware development
• Prepare the team for competition events

Project Management

One key implementation I made was a GitHub Projects Kanban board and Gantt chart. This helped to organize the order of which tasks were complete, break down a projects scope into several achievable goals, and assign personnel efficiently. This tool drastically increased team efficiency (95% of all created issues were resolved by the end of the year!) with the benefit of increasing visibility on resource allocation and the teams priorities. Tasks were assigned in weeklong sprints, and a standup meeting was held once weekly.

Kanban board organizing GitHub issues based on progress. Tags help to indicate task priority, category, and assignee.