Hello, new members! (And goodbye to an old one)

From left to right: Phu Le, technical artist; Avery Bainbridge, firmware specialist; Justin Ruths, faculty advisor; Cristian Cruz, behavior planning and controls (BPC); Joshua Williams, software architect; Quinn Loach, education and outreach; Nikhik Narvekar, BPC; Jim Moore, BPC; Kyle Zeng, perception; Raghav Pillai, web interface; Will Heitman, team lead; Connor Scally, simulation; Egan Johnson, BPC; Ragib Arnab, perception; Dylan Hiu, PR. Click to enlarge.

I’m proud to welcome nine new members to Nova, bringing our full team to fifteen talented undergrads. One year ago, Nova (called Voltron then) was just one undergrad and a faculty advisor. Six additional undergrad students carried us through Demo 1. As we begin our push toward Demo 2, I know that our new members will be a big help.

Our new members consist of algorithm development specialists, a technical artist, a PR director, a simulation engineer, a web application developer, and an education and outreach director. Each new member brings their own unique skillset, and I’m excited to see where we’ll go together. Autonomous driving is a crazy path to travel on, and it’s always better travel with a group.

While I welcome our new members, I’d also like give a big thank you and farewell to Grace Zhu. Grace was instrumental in developing our map data for Demo 1. Many of the mapping techniques that we rely on today were discovered by Grace, and she has made a lasting contribution to our project. Grace has recently moved back to UT Austin, where she studies as a CS undergrad.

Take a look at our updated membership section, where you can click on each of our members to read their story (thanks to Raghav for building this). One more welcome to Nikhil, Jim, Ragib, Avery, Connor, Dylan, Quinn, Phu, and Raghav!