Mars Rover
Mechanical Design Group Project
Winning Team, 2018 Junior Honors Design Award
Embedded Files
✅ Deliverables
Project management
Led weekly meetings + brainstorming sessions
Managed project timelines
Coordinated schedules + communications
Design engineering
Mechanism design
3D SolidWorks modeling
Building prototype using machine shop resources, including sheet metal bending
👨👩👧👦 Team Members
Xusheng Yu
Team Lead
Mechanical Engineer
Neil Smith
Mechanical Engineer
Samuel Faszer
Mechanical Engineer
Nik Wolodko
Mechanical Engineer
Winston Hu
Mechanical Engineer
For the Mechanical Design I engineering course, each team of 5 engineers were tasked with designing and building a remote-controlled rover to navigate a "Mars terrain" while completing 3 distinct design challenges.
Challenge 1: Pull a 2 kg rolling load across a 3 meter long "terrain" (table) with holes of various sizes, as fast as possible.
Challenge 2: Drop 6 balls into holes on the terrain, 1 at a time, with smaller holes earning more points.
Challenge 3: Capture 3 balls scattered around the terrain and deposit all of them in a designated spot.
As the team lead, project manager, and primary designer behind the hopper mechanism for Challenge 2, I led the team to design the 1st-place winning rover and was awarded the 2018 Junior Honors Design Award.
Hopper Design using
Centrifugal Acceleration 🌀
The second challenge was one of the most difficult. We needed to store 6 balls and drop them into holes on the terrain, but the catch is that we could only drop 1 ball in each hole.
Aiming for simplicity
Our team needed to figure out how to achieve this goal, while keeping the system simple and effective during the challenge. I was interested in creating a system that used no moving parts, as the only control we had were for two motors for the skid-steer drivetrain.
Step-by-step process
Our team broke down the steps needed to accomplish this challenge. We needed to:
Deploy a single ball into the hole in the track, while ensuring no more balls accidentally fall in.
Then, load the next ball into "ready position" to drop into the next hole.
With this approach, we decided that there should be 2 components, one containing the ball to be deployed, and one containing the other balls. Now we just needed to figure out how to load the balls, one at a time.
Final Design
While reviewing the motion of the rover, I realized that the centrifugal acceleration of the skid-steering, as well as the inertia of the rover, could be used to load the balls. By stopping the rover or spinning it around, the balls could be loaded into an open position to be deployed into the holes, one at a time.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse