NASA Robotic Mining Competition 2022-2023
NYU Tandon School of Engineering participates in the yearly NASA Robotic Mining Competition with its Robotic Design Team. The main objective is to construct a rover that is capable of transverse rough Lunar terrain (simulated with fine regolith at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, FL) and to excavate to 50cm depth to collect and store a sample of regolith.
For the 2022-2023 competition, I was promoted to lead mechanical engineer of the robot, from excavation mechanical lead the previous year. This meant leading the development of the excavation, locomotion, and chassis design. In addition, I took on responsibilities of a system engineer and project manager, where I would determine the robot system requirements, set timelines and organize the entire mechanical team to set collective and individual goals.
The main objective of NYU's Robotic Design Team robot for the 2022-2023 competition was to collect the most amount of material from a specific size range, primarily found at 50cm depth, in the predetermined time slot set by NASA. This objective differed from last year's competition as, on the previous occasion, the objective was to collect the purest sample of the specified gravel set by NASA. In contrast, this year we set to collect the most amount of material, even if that meant collecting some extra material that was not required. This came after a re-evaluation of NASA rules after the 2021-2022 competition, where it became apparent that more points could be achieved by providing a larger sample with some percentage of unnecessary material to obtaining a smaller amount of just pure specified material. This major system requirement and valuable learning experiences from the previous robot resulted in system requirements that our last platform could not fulfill. This opened the opportunity to rethink and reinvent our design completely.
This came as no small feat, as NASA provides around 8 months from when they publish the competition guidelines to the actual competition. Meaning that we had a very limited amount of time to come up with an efficient, reliable, and most importantly innovative design, to then have enough time for testing, iterating, manufacturing and integration with electrical and computer science sub teams.
After months of hard work, teamwork and a lot of creative breakthroughs, this was the design that competed in NASAs 2022-2023 RMC competition.
As mentioned before for the 2022-2023 season, we decided to create a system that was able to excavate the most amount of regolith as possible. For that we came up with the idea of utilizing something that we knew could dig in an endless cycle, the wheel. We tailored made a digging wheel to fit the size and power requirements of the robot, and we utilize creative and outside of the box thinking to reinvent it. The output was the idea to create a digging wheel with a stationary core and rotary steel.
This design allowed us to work around one of the biggest restrictions in the robot design, space. By making the core stationary, we were able to keep the excavated material there, therefore completely eliminating a separate storage subsystem, like a conveyor belt and deposition bin, that would have taken up valuable space. The digging wheel also allowed us to excavate continuously, and as fast as needed, as long as we had storage space.
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.
Lastly the locomotion system was also completely redesigned. As the competition takes place in a simulated lunar environment, which is a granular material similar to sand, one of the largest challenges is to get enough traction to be able to maneuver around the course. You require a design that is able to grip into the surface, not generate too much resistance, is rugged enough to go over mounts and holes, and is agile enough for tight turning.
In order to comply with those requirements we significantly increased the size of our wheel, giving us a larger contact area with the sand, while also resulting in a much more capable system to go over the obstacles on the course. Nonetheless increase size is not enough, as you also need to grab to the material, for this we took inspiration from the water wheel, we needed a large surface area to create a reaction force with the sand, therefore needing a fraction of the wheel to sink into the ground, the blades of a water mill structure allowed us to do that, while the side wall prevented the material from dispersing and therefore decreasing our reaction force.
In addition to the redesigning of the wheel, we also redesign the way the power was transmitted from the chassis to the wheel. By 3D printing a tailored case, that would bolt on directly onto the motor and then clamp and bolt directly on to the beam, resulted in a rigid connection and a very smooth force transition that gave us significant mobility and speed.
The robot was a complete success, it went on to win second place on the most innovative student lead project from NYU. The project generated so much recognition that the Dean of NYU, Andrew D Hamilton, came to the team to learn more about it. And finally, the robot made history in the NASA competition as being the first robot in NYU’s RDT 10-year history, that collects material and deposits at the competition.
Bellow you can find both the proof of life video sent to NASA in early March and the NASA competition live stream from May.
The first video is the proof of life vide that we send to NASA two month prior to the competition, to prove that all the subsystems were operational. It was a great success as we were able to show every functionality of the robot.
The second is the video from the NASA competition. Unfortunately, the wireless communication team had a malfunction for the first half of the predetermined time by NASA, therefore preventing us from completing a full run for the robot, nonetheless it gave us enough time to speed through each phase and deposited the first few rocks of NYU RDT history. Please scroll to time 9:25:00.
This leaves us very happy with the amount of progress we were able to achieve within one year, but it also leaves us hungry and very motivated to improve even more to achieve the ultimate goal of winning the competition next year! We will not rest until we achieve it!
Thank you for reading,
Please reach out if you liked the project, more about me and my contact information is in my About me section on the top right!
And stay tuned for our next year's comeback!
