Design Team Members: Imran Ebrahim, Thomas Haylock, Paul Marchwica
Supervisor: Professor W. Melek
Background
The Mars Society University Rover Challenge (URC) is targeted at undergraduate and graduate students and offers the challenge to develop a rover for use on future Mars missions. Designing a rover is not a novel task; however, the skills developed while undertaking such an activity are valued in industry. Both government agencies and their aerospace industry counterparts are facing a major workforce crisis in finding young, qualified engineers to work on space development. NASA has more engineers over the age of 60 than under 30, and will soon face a labour shortage as the former begin to retire. The URC challenges students to create a wirelessly controlled rover, able to traverse Mars-like terrain. The contest is held annually in May at the Mars Desert Research Station (Utah, USA), which provides a reasonable analogue to the soil, rocks, and geological features found on Mars.
Project
description
A rover will be designed and constructed according to the specifications released by the Mars Society URC committee. Due to the large scale of the project, a team of volunteers was formed to help design and construct the rover. Volunteers largely help with design related to contest events, while the central electronic framework will be completed for the Systems Design Engineering 4th year design project. The Rover Team volunteers will be able to build upon this framework so that the team may successfully travel to Utah in May 2009 and compete in the URC. The Systems Design Engineering 4th year project work relates to selecting a chassis, and using LabVIEW software to interface a laptop with various components including chassis motors, robotic arm, and cameras. The e-Savage RC car illustrated in Figure 1, was chosen as the basic chassis platform.
Figure 1: the eSavage RC Car will be used as a platform for the UW Mars Rover
Design methodology
The
University
Rover
Challenge
brings
together
a
diverse
range
of
students
from
not
only
varying
engineering
disciplines,
but
also
from
different
faculties.
Sub-teams
were
formed
to
manage
development
of
the
various
rover
components
and
all
team
members
are
gaining
significant
knowledge
while
making
useful
contributions
to
the
rover.
There
are
many
challenges
associated
with
a
project
of
this
scale
and
so
a
standard
process
is
used
to
ensure
skill
development
and
rover
design
proceeds
in
a
timely
manner.
The
process
includes
the
following
phases:
- Learning: much to learn in order to send something to Mars.
- Discussing: the more insight from experts and team discussion, the better the end result.
- Sourcing: buy parts locally or from internet retailers.
- Implementation, Debugging, Modeling: make it work.