Rover
Technical details
Chassis y Rocker Bogie
- This is a type of suspension developed by NASA and adapted by us.
- It allows the vehicle to climb over obstacles (rocks, steps, etc.) up to twice the diameter of the wheels while keeping the chassis level and all six wheels on the ground.
- It is mainly composed of square carbon fibre tubing and aluminium couplings.
Robotic Arm
- It has 6 degrees of freedom and a maximum reach of 0.8 m.
- The arm is mainly composed of folded sheet metal geometries, carbon fibre panels and 3D printed ABS plastic.
- The design focuses on dexterity and uses high-torque stepper motors.
- For economical but effective feedback, the angular position of each joint is calculated using analogue potentiometers.
- The position and velocity of the end-effector are calculated from joystick movements via inverse kinematics. Work is in progress to automate this.
Electronic Box
- This is the brain of the Rover.
- Its architecture is unique and uses hardware programming.
- For low-level control: A DE0-Soc FPGA is used.
- For high-level control: An NVIDIA: Jetson TX2 Developer Kit is used, which processes all the control signals that the Rover must follow through a serial channel.
Control & Automation
Control: The rover uses the ROS operating system to segment the tasks to be performed and generate the actions that the rover should follow.
Automation: Work is being done on route planning algorithms as high-level control and a low-level Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) controller.