Team Moon Pi
Rhex
NASA Robotic Mining Competition: Lunabotics 2020
Competition Background
The NASA Robotics Mining Competition(RMC): Lunabotics is held at Kennedy Space Center every year. In the competition a Simulated Lunar Environment is set up and teams are tasked with mining icy rocks that are under the surface of the regolith, a layer of loose and very fine rocks, covering the icy rocks. The competition challenges students to design a mining robot with innovative new concepts that may be applied to an actual excavation device or payload on an In-Situ Resource Utilisation (ISRU) mission. This competition allows students to build skills for developing autonomous robotic mining on the Moon and other extraterrestrial locations. It also gives students the opportunity to complete the engineering lifecycle from conceptual development, to system closeout. The teams are evaluated on a variety of topics from robot performance, to Systems Engineering reports, and to outreach into the community.
Team Background
The teams focus this year is to finish developing and implementing Wheeled Legs, which are commonly referred to as Wegs, in addition to autonomizing the robot to receive a better score in competition. The robot uses Wegs which are C shaped legs that allow for a compromise between ground clearance and complexity. Wegs allow the robot to achieve more ground clearance for less volume than can be achieved with traditional wheels. Wegs also allow for a less complicated and complex deployment of a legged robot than traditional robot legs allow for. The inspiration of using Wegs is loosely based on Boston Dynamics’ Rhex Robot. After the Wegs have been successfully integrated into the robot, the team will shift its focus over to achieving autonomy. While the competition allows for tele-op control of the robot, there is a significant amount of points to be gained with autonomous controls. In addition to working full time on technical solutions to engineering problems, the team is actively seeking to recruit students majoring in Business and Human Factors in order to achieve a diversity of majors within the team, as well as being able to have an insight from other backgrounds to tackle any problem that the team encounters.
Rhex - Features
Mechanical
1m x 0.5m x 0.5m
>60kg
Wheeled Legs (“Wegs”)
Electrical
Custom designed electrical boards using Autodesk Eagle
Software
Python
ROS
