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Learn moreExcavating Arm
Excavating Arm
My Final Year with Titan Rover
My senior capstone project and the culmination of my time on Titan Rover, the excavating arm is a monster of 16 machined custom linkages and mounting plates, hundreds of pieces of hardware, 3 NEMA stepper motors, and several 3D printed pieces.
Here's what I did to create the first fully functional soil extraction system on a Titan Rover platform. This page exists both to further substantiate my in-depth involvement in the creation of the arm and to provide some references for future Titan Rover members or interested parties.
The University Rover Challenge (URC)
URC is a yearly competition held in Hanskville, Utah, at or near the Mars Desert Research Station by the Mars Society that calls for University teams to produce mobile robotic platforms that would feasibly accompany the first astronauts on Mars. In order to simulate this task, four subtasks are assigned and scored - Extreme Delivery and Retrieval, Autonomous Traversal, Science, and Equipment Servicing. The Science task involves the identification of the presence of extinct or extant life, either in a given soil sample or on rock specimen.
As a part of the Science subteam on Titan Rover, the point of the excavating arm was to enable the Rover to pull soil out of discrete containers for further analysis as well as to enable the identification of rocks. It formed the point of contact between the Rover and the soil site, and interfaced directly with a distribution system that would segment the soil into small volumes for our selected assays of the hydrogen peroxide test, microscopy, and protein extraction.
Our past experiences at competition and the rules provided for it explicitly informed every step of development of the 2019 system.
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