Welcome to MIL!

If you have reached this page, you likely want to get started working in MIL. We’re quite excited to have you on the team! MIL has been committed to designing high-quality robots for several decades at the University of Florida, and we’re excited that you’re interested in becoming part of that history.

Our team has world championship tournaments across the globe five times, and we’ve placed amongst the top three teams fifteen times. You can help us to win our sixth championship!

What is MIL?

From our website:

The Machine Intelligence Laboratory (MIL) provides a synergistic environment dedicated to the study and development of intelligent, autonomous robots. The faculty and students associated with the laboratory conduct research in the theory and realization of machine intelligence covering topics such as machine learning, real-time computer vision, statistical modeling, robot kinematics, autonomous vehicles, teleoperation and human interfaces, robot and nonlinear control, computational intelligence, neural networks, and general robotics. Applications of MIL research include autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), autonomous water surface vehicles (ASVs), autonomous land vehicles, autonomous air vehicles (AAVs including quadcopters and micro air vehicles, MAVs) , swarm robots, humanoid robots, and autonomous household robots.”

– https://mil.ufl.edu

That indeed is a great insight into some of the technologies used in our lab. The technologies used in MIL are generally split across three different teams, the Mechanical Team, Electrical Team, and Software Team. These teams typically develop individual systems by themselves and then share the results with the other teams. This allows for the desired synergy when constructing world-class robots.

You can join any of these three teams (or multiple!). Each team has one or more leaders who help to coordinate the responsibilities of the team.

Culture of MIL

MIL does things differently than many other labs or student organizations. Our lab aims to be very inclusive, in order to find the best ideas from the student body. There is no application process to join, and members choose the amount to which they want to get involved. We hope that this flexibility inspires innovation across and between the teams.

Alumni are also a large part of MIL (if you come in frequently, you will get to meet some of them!). Alumni from MIL are scattered all throughout the world, some of whom have founded their own companies, or joined notable technical companies. We are gracious that our alumni continue to rigorously support MIL.

Outside of the technical aspect of MIL, we are a strong community. Members will frequently hang out together on the weekends, be in the lab late at night, go on “food trains” (a bunch of MILers heading to a restaurant for a bite to eat), and embark on trips across the world. We’d love to have you become a MILer, too!

For more information, read about our culture.

Join Slack and say hello!

We use Slack as our primary communication platform. On Slack, you can communicate with members of your team, and members of other teams. This is where we can stay up to date with each other about the progress of the robots.

Our Slack workspace can be found at uf-mil.slack.com. Ask someone in MIL to invite you, or email ems@ufl.edu (the lab director, Dr. Eric Schwartz).

Jump in!

Well - we hope that was a great introduction to what we do! We hope that you’re feeling excited to jump right in - if not, no worries, we’re here to help you!

Note

Our first meeting of the Fall 2021 semester was recorded. The meeting includes a brief overview of MIL (similar to the above) and a tour of the lab. We encourage you to watch, but it’s not required to get started.

You can find the recording here.

The next step is to look into joining a specific team: