Opportunities at PAVE

PAVE prides itself on being entirely student run. In addition to participating in research, students handle all of the team’s administrative, promotional, and logistical responsibilities. Below, you’ll find a sampling of the many roles that members play as part of PAVE: hardware & electronics, software development, marketing, events/outreach, and leadership. We’ve also provided some information about membership & commitment at the bottom of the page. There’s something for just about everyone, and most of these areas require little familiarity or technical knowledge to start. We’re always excited to include new members into our workflow, and we’re always eager to help you learn more.

Hardware & Electronics

At PAVE, working with hardware and electronics gives you hands-on experience with the entire robot design and construction process. You’ll use CAD tools to design and lay out robot components, machine any custom parts and sensor mounts in the machine shop, design and build any necessary custom circuitry, and then assemble it all together into a robot. There’s absolutely no experience required to get started, although machining experience and/or Autodesk Inventor/CAD experience is a plus.

Much of the basic machining for our robots is done in our garage, and we’ll be happy to teach you the basics. However, working in one of the campus machine shops requires additional training. Visit our wiki to learn more.
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Software Development

Software forms the core of our research at PAVE. Areas of active software development include: Image processing for lane and obstacle detection, obstacle tracking, navigation algorithms for path planning, path generation, and path following, and control algorithms. Our software stack is almost entirely custom-developed, and as part of our software team, you’ll innovate on top of our current codebase by incorporating the latest techniques and algorithms in robotics resarch. All of our software is currently being implemented using C++ in Robot Operating System(ROS). However, our only requirement is that you know a programming language and basic programming concepts, and adapting to using C++ from C or Java is a cinch!

If you have no programming experience at all, we ask that you take COS 126: Computer Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach before joining our software development teams. It’s mandatory for engineers anyway, and you can always contribute to our other divisions while you’re learning how to program!

Marketing

The marketing team promotes our team through various media channels, and acquires and maintains partnerships and sponsorships. The team is responsible for administrating the team website, writing news stories, website content, and press releases. Members also promote PAVE by writing promotional documents and managing our social media presence. Members engage existing partners and seek out potential sponsors, partner businesses, and institutions. Finally, the marketing team works with other projects and teams to curate photos and produce team videos. If you’re interested in any of the aforementioned areas, don’t hesitate to contact us about getting involved!
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Events/Outreach

The Events/Outreach team focus on organizing and coordinating PAVE’s presence at campus, community, and professional events. Additionally, the Events/Outreach team is also responsible for reaching out to the public and educating them about robotics. Part promotion, part community service, the outreach team works closely with marketing in order to reach out to local schools and communities. PAVE also works with local FIRST robotics teams, and our involvement with them has been organized by our Outreach division, as were our presentations at the semi-annual Society of Women Engineering High School Colloquium at Princeton.
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Leadership

[This section is under construction]

Membership & Commitment

joining PAVE is a relatively painless process:

Sign up: you can sign up during freshman orientation, or at the activities fair.
Kickoff meeting: We’ll have an introductory meeting featuring a presentation chock full with all the reasons why we’re awesome and you should join. Afterwards, we’ll be asking you for your interests so we can plan for the weeks ahead
Start participating: it’s that simple. We’ll start with a few introductory sessions to get everyone familiar with the state of projects, but other than that, each project will set its own schedule.
Joining later in the year: If you somehow managed to miss all of the hubbub surrounding our annual launch, don’t despair! We welcome new members at any point in the semester. Just drop us a line or come to one of our events/meetings to start participating.

Working with PAVE is as big (or little) of a time commitment as every member decides it to be. We encourage students to work on whatever and however many teams they like, switching between them and taking on more or less responsibility as they see fit. Our teams are by no means exclusive and every member is welcome to pursue whatever interests they might have at their own leisure.