This week, although week 3, was our first official meeting for the ground team of the UCI Rescue Robotics Challenge. We are a small team of 5, and all introduced ourselves and talked about our various backgrounds, and dove into what we would be working on throughout this quarter. Professor Krichmar brought out some of the robots from the previous years and went into detail about how he would like these robots improved over last year’s design. Our main goal for this year is to improve the design of the current six wheeled ground robot by making it lighter, stronger and more cost effective. As we are running the competition mainly to get local colleges, high schools and middle schools involved, cost is a big factor here. If we can improve this design and get it safely under one thousand dollars for the whole package, we can make detailed assembly and coding diagrams and get it sent over to the local schools so they have a baseline to get themselves started with joining this program. Currently the main six wheeled ground vehicle we have is in operating condition, however some parts need functional improvement and greater structural rigidity. In addition to this, professor Krichmar would like us to be running a fleet of robots that communicate with each other in the competition this year, so after we improve the first six wheeled robot we have, two more will be built. If we can get all that done within a reasonable amount of time, experimentation can begin on three more smaller, cheaper, robots that will allow us to experiment with a heterogeneous robotic system while further decreasing the cost of entry for the competition. Pictured is the first six wheeled robot, and an experimental test bed for the smaller, cheaper robot.