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Projects

The conveyor belt system - excavation and deployment system - was designed to pivot around a point on the front of the robot, this allowed us to store the conveyor belt to meet the size requirements and then deploy it with a large range of motion and volume collection potential. The conveyor belt system was designed to be functional in both directions, which meant that it had buckets facing both directions, when spun anti-clockwise, the conveyor belt would digg material and transport it to the storage location, when spun clockwise, the conveyor belt would transport the material out of the storage location into the intended area in the arena.  On the other hand, a scissor lift mechanic was chosen due to the high loads that the collection-storage-deployment bin would encounter when fully loaded. This still allowed us to store the system tightly to meet the initial size constraints but then provided a large range of motion and force that could be used to achieve the system's three objectives. When the bin was used for storage, the linear actuators were completely retracted and the bin had a slight downward slope that would hold the material carried by the conveyor belt. When translating the linear would either stay in place or slightly raise to shift the weight of the material and balance the robot, and when deploying, the linear actuators would fully extend and let the regolith fall onto the conveyor belt system which would then carry the material to the intended location in the arena. 

NASA Robotic Mining Competition 2023-2024

Design and construct a rover for lunar exploration, focused on transporting lunar regolith to construct berms for habitat and protection. 

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In addition to redesigning the excavation mechanism, we had to rethink the translation mechanism. As we learned from last year, linear actuators are extremely useful, but they take up a lot of space and are considerably heavy, therefore for this year we implemented a pivot point system, this allowed us to have a much larger range of motion, while also providing a much lower count of failure points. Nonetheless in order for the chassis to withstand such a high torque, it had to be reinvented. The objective was to distribute the concentrated moment as efficiently as possible through the entire chasis. In order to do that, we needed to decrease any loose connections, between the beams, that could wear and tear over time from the repetitive loading and potentially lead to failure, while also increasing the strength of the beam components that made up the chassis. In order to do so we decided to utilize aluminum box tube as the structural frame, for their high strength-weight ratio, and most importantly 3D printed closed fit connections between beams, that would hold tight each component an eliminate any type of insecure connections, while also providing us the capability of disassembling if needed, something welding did not provide.

NASA Robotic Mining Competition 2022-2023

Design and construct a rover for lunar exploration focused on the collection and storage of lunar regolith for water and organic matter analysis.

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Soft Robotics

Design a soft robotic finger with vision based proprioception for 3D shape reconstruction.

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NASA Robotic Mining Competition 2021-2022

Design and construct a rover for lunar exploration, focused on the collection and storage of lunar regolith.  

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