Hi, all
And goodbye, since this is my last blog. I will, however, be presenting on my internship in the fall.
I am intern at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, CO, working under Dr. Andrew Petruska and PhD student Rich Pratt. This summer, I have spent the majority of my time working on two projects: 1. Designing a lunar rover 2. Building an autonomous robot.
Before I sign off this blog, I would like to thank my parents, Pinhead, Dr. Petruska and his lab, and the Turners, my host family. To all of them, thank you so much for the role you played in making this possible, I am incredibly grateful.
For the first project, I have been working with Rich on designing a lunar rover in partnership with NASA and Lunar Outpost, a local start-up. The rover’s purpose is to compact the regolith in order to prepare landing sites for heavier craft. The role I played was collecting a list of parts for the robot, specifically the camera system, as well as designing a bucket for the skid steer-like rover. Unfortunately, my internship has ended before I could do more work on the project.
The second was to mount a LiDAR camera to an existing robot, named the Jackal, as well as a computer, and create an autonomous, self contained system. This project started around halfway through my internship. Most of the time working in the project was spent waiting for parts to arrive, because a few sizing issues arose. It wasn’t until this week that I was able to finish the mounting process for the LiDAR, which was well timed to coincide with the arrival of the computers. However, since my internship is ending, I will have to pass on the project to another intern. Another part of this project to be passed on is connecting the electronics to the Jackal’s power supply, which poses an issue because the voltage needed is not readily available from the robot’s integrated ports.
This week, I assembled the camera mounting system once the components arrived, and mounted the cameras up. I then moved on to the new issue of mounting the computer, which proved difficult since there is little room to mount inside, and it lacks mounting capabilities, since there are no holes for screws to attach to. I also created a document with all the information the next intern would need.
This week, I didn’t do too much outside of work. I spent some of my time packing to head home, and it was too hot outside to do much. On my last day, I went and rode at Buffalo Creek, which was beautiful.
The first 4 pictures are of the Jackal, which I spent a lot of my time working on this summer. The first is of a few with cameras mounted, the second is of the Jackal from a front view sitting on my desk, the third is of the internals, and the last is a concept of how the Jetson computer will be mounted. Then, a few photos from Buff Creek. There were a number of interesting rock formations scattered about.
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