Champion Mars Rover
navigate "mars" surface
MISSION OBJECTIVES: Design a mars rover to navigate "mars" surface. Because of the different ground situation, no wheels are allowed in this mission. So only tracks or legs.
PROJECT GOAL: To navigate the room across the hallway with video feed from the on board camera only, and we will need to develop some kind of grab devices to pickup the mars minerals -- hershey kisses and cotton balls.
DESIGN & RESULT: I designed this rover as a product that is gonna be used on some foriegn places so it must be durable and reliable while it should still be easy to work with when in the lab. I searched through my ideas and found that if I want to pick up something with the robotics arm, I'd better have a stable locomotion platform to work with, hence the tracks.
I deciced to use mouse pad for the track by stiching the two end of a stripe together on a sewing mechine. The structure is made of laser cut hardboard for the most part. The core idea of this design is to have a stable move-and-grab system. So I have a tracked drivetrain and a rack extension arm on the top mounted on a gear set to give me that extra bit of reach.
To fullfile the requirements on the amount of servos that we were allowed to use, I came up with this brilliant idea of building a sticky pad and used to actually "pickup" the minerals. And it worled so perfectly that my robot go 51 points in the final contest in class while the average number is no more than ten. I have picked up 18 hershey kisses for 2 points each and 15 cotton balls for 1 point each.
PROJECT CHALLENGES:
Some of the challenges I faced during the project are:
one of the tracks that I made is a little shorter than it should be, and I noticed this problem after I have already put everything together. I somehow -- maybe because of laziness -- decided to put the frame together with gluing the joints together instead of using screws... That is not even the worst. imagine having to replace one of the servos on the track system when it burned out due to the friction caused by the short track..IT WAS A MESS.
But I made it work, well.
RESULT:
A direct quote from one of my classmates, "your robot is the only one that looks like it should have been designed in NASA's lab for a real mars mission."
