My view on the project as a whole (if anybody wants to know) would be that this year should be focused on finding new team leads. Many projects I’ve seen over the years have had awful endings because nobody was around to take the project. CalState Fullerton will not be competing this year because their main work team graduated. UC San Diego last year had a lot of trouble with old members graduating. In short, we need to prepare for the future. (Oddly enough, we seem to be out-of-phase with the rest of the schools’ transition periods.) This year is perfect because we’re also very low on funding. (Last year’s administration seemed to use money quite excessively…)
I’ve also had a bit of trouble with a lot of the people in the UAV team. Unfortunately, I play favorites when it comes to people. Humans in general like to make inferences from previous data.
From the previous data gathered about a person in times that their original guess did not work as intended, I like to infer how someone will behave in the future. If what they originally proposed did not work as intended, and they try to fix it, then I will play favorites for said person. If what they originally proposed did not work as intended, and they believe it works perfectly fine despite glaring deficiencies, then I will play favorites against said person.
Engineering is quite weird. Sometimes, what is proposed is absolutely preposterous. If it works, then who is to argue? If it doesn’t work, the engineer must realize that it doesn’t work and move on. Sometimes, it’s difficult to see that it doesn’t work or it’s difficult to move on. This is the case for the current UAV camera. (Did I mention that almost every single test image was more or less deleted from all existence?)
From the original days when I actually was involved with “UAV Things” simply as the comms. guy, I remember using a Canon DSLR (T2i) to take the images. It was hacked to pieces, and the mechanical engineering team had quite a go at it. But it fit into the plane and it took pictures well, who’s to argue that? (Granted, a mechanical problem did arise when it landed. Our “engineering guestimate” is that the mirror was nudged in a way that the camera firmware wasn’t comfortable with. A mirrorless camera can fix this quite easily.)
As far as I’m concerned, it may have been a good decision to leave when my gut feeling told me to leave (the beginning of last year). We may have won tenth place this year (3rd nationally, 1st statewide), but we have lost the vote of confidence from our members (our entire ME department (with the exception of a few select people) collapsed including the previous ME coordinator).