NASA Robotics
In the summer of 2011, I interned at the Goddard Spaceflight Center at the Robotics Bootcamp group consisted of 30 students both undergraduate and graduate collaborating to achieve the main goal of designing and building a rover in 10 weeks. I worked in three different projects including the mechanical design of the rover, a robotic arm, and a camera mounting mechanism. Some of the projects are discussed in detail here.
Green Land Rover (GROVER)
Over the past years, global warming has become an important concern in scientific research carried out at NASA. The Greenland Rover (GROVER) was built with the purpose of having an autonomous robot that could carry ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to support scientific research in Greenland. The robot measures the thickness of ground layers to provide climate information. GROVER I is was the original version of the GROVER project and had the capacity to carry a maximum of 100 pounds traveling at 2 miles per hour in deep and soft snow.
The main difficulties of GROVER I were the size and weight. In this project an optimized version of GROVER I was designed and manufactured. GROVER II had an improved design that made it portable but still able to perform its mission, it was half the size of the first version, and it was designed to travel in different types of terrain. As part of the mechanical team, I assessed the chassis structure using Solidworks and MATLAB to model the chassis and simulate stresses.
Robotic Arm
One of NASA’s top priorities when it comes to terrestrial missions is to collect ground materials for scientific research. A subset of interns worked on the design of a 7-DOF robotic arm to be mounted on a cluster robot for the LARGE project (Lidar Assistive Robotic Exploration Group) and perform collection and manipulation tasks.
The robotic arm was an improved design of an arm developed from a working wood prototype designed and built the summer before and it had the capacity of carrying and moving a mass of 600 grams, while mimicking human arm movements. In this project, I collaborated with a team to design the upper structure of the arm, perform FEA analysis in AutoDesk Inventor and assemble the prototype. The images above show a CAD model of the arm and the process of assemblying the prototype.
