Meeting notes from December main meeting

December 13, 2025

Thoughts about our December meeting

Discussion

We discussed what sorts of talks and activities would be of most interest to the membership. I observed that while the overall membership is quite diverse, the ones who come to the meetings tend to be more technical.

Note this might be self-selecting. People earlier in their Robotics journey might feel that they won't be able to contribute or participate if everyone who comes or presents is dreams PID and Kalman Filters.

You can see the results of my informal survey below. Summary: Participants in this meeting were strongly on the technical side, evenly split between hobbyists and professionals, and more software than hardware oriented.

Raw Results

Meeting attendance: 21 people
First timers: 5
ROS1/2 users: ~10
Non ROS: ~13
Personal/Hobby projects: 13
Professional: ~10
C/C++: 19
Python: Many
Java: 1
Use AI/Chatgpt everyday: 7
Self-described software person: 12
Self-described hardware person: 6

What kinds of talks would you like to see

behavior tree talk - high interest
ros topics & messages - medium interest
networking, DDS, RMW, etc - low interest (there were audience comments, but not many raised their hand)
basic electrical - medium interest
computer architecture, arduino vs raspi vs ? - medium interest
very small robots - low interest

Lightning Talks

Sample image

We had a three "lightning" talks: Buddy E showed some cool techniques for dealing with ROS2 bag files. Varun Raghavendra showed his project LeKapda.

Beaverworks

Joel Grim and Chris Lai gave a talk about their work at Beaverworks Summer Institute at MIT. Chris went deep on the RACECAR course, part of Beaverworks. I thought it was very interesting to hear the ways Chris explains things complex Robotics concepts to students. I liked the progression from “how do you drive a car” … "what if you had to write a program to command the car to follow this maze” etc. Pedagogically it feels very effective.