Fall Semester

Week 13: System Level Design Review

This week the Orbiteers completed their System Level Design Review (the document and the presentation)!! All the previous work from the Preliminary Design Review, Prototype Inspection Day, and the Peer Review Events led us to this monumental achievement. We presented… Read More

Week 12: Almost Friday

We, the Orbiteers, delivered our Peer Review System Level Design Review (PR SLDR) this week to an audience of graduate students and professors. Our presentation was very well received, and the majority of the feedback was positive. Leading up to… Read More

Week 11: The Plot in Us

This was a week of code changes and end-of-semester preparations that kept us quite busy! We implemented plotting for our observation structure (OBS), missed targets, boresight vectors, and training metrics. Each of these will improve explainability in our project by… Read More

Week 10: Prototype Inspection Day

The Orbiteers had a fantastic time showing off our project at Prototype Inspection Day this week! A picture of us setting up our code to demo is shared below. We demoed our simulator prototype and received feedback from six UF… Read More

Week 9: Prototype Progress

This week, our team made significant progress on our satellite simulator in preparation for Prototype Inspection Day next week. In last week’s update, we shared our initial prototype of a basic rule-based system. This provided a solid foundation for an… Read More

Week 8: Observing Space

The Orbiteers were able to get the first rule-based closed loop working in a “toy box” environment! This accomplishment is a major step in the project since we now have a solid foundation to build off of. This first loop… Read More

Week 7: Exploring Space

The Orbiteers put finishing touches on the Preliminary Design Report (PDR) and its accompanying presentation. Ryan and Trevor picked up the rental car on Wednesday night so that the Orbiteers could travel together in style to MRSL headquarters in Sarasota… Read More

Week 6: Liftoff!!

3…2…1… We have liftoff! With the finalization of our Preliminary Design Review and the presentation with feedback from our peers, we are ready to demonstrate our progress thus far and begin the programming development. Our visit at MRSL is on the… Read More

Week 5: Final Launch Status Checklist

With a roadmap and a clearer system architecture, we are now performing final checks for launch! This week we have laid the groundwork for the project by finalizing our preliminary system architecture and defining specific inputs and outputs for each… Read More

Week 4: Time to Launch!

Building off of last week’s achievements, the Orbiteers are counting down to launch! With the project goals and limitations defined after our in-person meeting with MRSL, we were able to draft our system architecture including the various inputs and outputs… Read More

Week 3: Charting the Course

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… Read More

Week 2: Building Momentum

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… Read More

Week 1: Meet Team 16

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… Read More