This week marked an exciting milestone for the Orbiteers: our first in-person meeting with our sponsor MRSL here at UF. It was a great opportunity to connect face-to-face, share ideas, and align on how the project will take shape over the coming months. We spent time exploring the project from a higher level, with its main components and connections outlined clearly. It was both productive and energizing to talk through everything in person.

Beyond the meeting itself, we also spent time identifying potential risks, outlining a project roadmap, and setting up tools to organize our work. Looking forward, our focus is on taking these early steps and steadily building them into tangible progress.

This week we held our first meeting with our liaison, where we introduced ourselves and began asking questions to better understand the path ahead. We also refined our project goals and laid some early groundwork for how we’ll approach the project as it grows in complexity. On the creative side, we gave our team logo a fresh update after receiving feedback from classmates.

Looking ahead, we’re eager to dive deeper into the challenges of the CAPS project. In the weeks to come, we expect plenty of discussion, reading, and teamwork as we build momentum, and we’re excited to learn from one another while taking on these opportunities together.

Hello, and welcome to Team 16’s first blog post! We are excited to start working with our sponsor MRSL and our coach Dr. Christian Grant on the Commercial Autonomous/AI Processing in Space (CAPS) project! Our team consists of many talented Computer Science and Computer Engineering majors, and the CAPS project will require us to develop cloud software and adaptive image processing algorithms that can process large amounts of data under time, space, and energy constraints.

We met as a team for the first time during the IPPD class period on Tuesday and started reviewing the scope of work for the CAPS project. We also met with our coach, Dr. Grant, for the first time on Thursday, in order to prepare for the first meeting with our liaison. This week, we were able to discuss the initial distribution of team responsibilities and came up with our team’s name (Orbiteers) and logo. The IPPD journey ahead is sure to be tough, but we are hoping to start strong and work efficiently to contribute as much as we can this year!

Meet the Team: