Hello everyone, my name is Andrew Kistler, and I am spending my summer in Golden Colorado at Colorado School of Mines. For the next six weeks, I will be working in the M3 Robotics lab with Dr. Andrew Petruska as well as some graduate and undergraduate students.
The lab under a contract with NASA and working on a moon rover that will prepare landing sights for spacecraft on the moon. But this rover needs to be tested before being sent to the moon. So the lab is currently working on building a 10m by 10m enclosure that simulates the moon in order to test the rover.
The Moon Rover
Frame for the Testing Enclosure
The prototype of the gantry system
The rover is designed for moon gravity, which is approximately 1/6 that of earth gravity, so because of this, the rover is unable to carry its battery on earth. To solve this issue, the lab has designed a gantry system that utilizes tracks and moves above the rover and is able to supply power to it. One of the tasks this week was to test a lidar system and find a way to mount it to the gantry system. Lidar works by using light to tell how far away something is. In this project, lidar is being used to track the location of the gantry as it moves above the rover. We were tasked with testing the accuracy of the lidar over different distances. During these tests, we concluded that the lidar loses accuracy over long distances. In order to fix this issue, we calculated the size of the target needed in order to keep the lidar accurate over longer distances. This targets size has now been implemented into the design. We also designed a mount for the lidar sensor on Solidworks that ensures the lidar is perfectly straight and makes sure the light beam is properly pointed at the target.
Lidar Sensor with 3 different iterations of the mount
Testing the lidar over different distances
In addition to the lidar mount I was also tasked along with an undergraduate student to design a way to mount the limit switch for gantry. The limit switch will be used to stop the gantry system when it reaches the end of its tracks. It was a very simple design but we needed ensure not much force was put through the switch as it was fairly fragile. We mounted our design to one of the prototype gantry carts and tested it to make sure switch wouldn’t break on impact.
Limit switch mounted on one of the gantry carts
Outside of the internship I had some time to go on a mountain bike ride at Green Mountain Park which is conveniently only a 10 minute bike ride from where I’m living.
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