The Google Summer of Code student application period has begun and continues until Mar 27th!

ArduPilot is participating again this year so if you are a university student, age 18 or higher and interested in working on projects for ardupilot for the summer and getting paid for it, please submit an application!

The mentors on the ArduPilot side are some of the most experienced developers on the ArduPilot team including Tridge and Randy. It’s a great opportunity to get hands-on robotics programming experience in a fun environment where you know your work will end up being used by a massive number of users.

Here is our welcome message and some extra advice on making your application:

review the list of possible projects and pick one or alternatively you may have your own ideas about a project that would be of benefit to ArduPilot

initially save your submission to ArduPilot as a draft so that we can review it and give feedback. Submit it as a final draft before Mar 27th.

in your application outline how you think it could be done and why you are qualified to do it

include links to work you have done (code, projects, videos, Github or other repository, etc) demonstrating your programming experience.

ask questions on the ArduPilot GSoC 2018 discussion forum or gitter channel 1

a description summarizing how you plan to go about implementing the project you have selected. This should include a clear statement about your project objective, and a high level description of how you plan to achieve it. You should strive to be as precise as possible, describing the basic building blocks, algorithms and code you plan to write, and how you would integrate them with the existing code base. What Ardupilot libraries would you modify? How will your code interact with existing features? What sort of testing procedures do you plan to use? While you can’t have exact answers now, your application should show that you have given some thought to these questions and that you have a general idea as to their answers.

prior contributions to ArduPilot are a plus so consider tackling a “good first issue” from our to-do list.

Submitting more than one proposal

You are welcome to submit more than one proposal if you are interested by more than one idea. Google allows submitting up to three proposals, although we would recommend two at most. This is because both Google and ArduPilot believe, in a nutshell, that quality is more important than quantity.

Hardware requirements, if any

Include in your application any hardware you believe will be required that you do not have. While simulation can be used for most ideas, some projects will benefit from specialized hardware, and ArduPilot will contribute to hardware acquisition on a case by case basis. Be sure to indicate whether you believe obtaining such hardware would be “nice to have”, vs “absolutely required”.

Example proposals

There are no specific requirements for the format of your proposal, so we leave that up to you. To give you and idea, however, here are two winning proposals from two of our students last year, who graciously made their proposal available online. You can find them here3, and here1.

Additional information and links

FAQ:

Q. how many students will be selected?

A. the number of slots is announced after all the student submission are in so we don’t know yet. Last year Google gave us 4 slots so we are hoping from something close to that. It also depends upon the quality of the proposals from students.

Thanks and we are looking forward to your submissions!