Abstract
This paper focuses on demonstrating the design and build stages, and effort done by Systems Engineering students team (DustyTRON NASA Robotics) to develop a mining robot that was used in the 2016 National Aeronautics & Space Ad-ministration (NASA) Robotics Mining Competition (RMC). The objective of the NASA RMC challenge is to encourage engineering students to design and build a robot that will excavate, collect, and deposit a simulated Martian regolith. Mining water/ice, and regolith is very essential task for space missions and resource utilization, they contain many elements such as metals, minerals, and other compounds. The Mining will allow extracting pro-pellants from the regolith such as Oxygen and Hydrogen that can be used as an energy source for in-space transportation. In addition, the space mining system can be used in tasks that are important for human and robotics scientific investigations. The DustyTRON team consists of Systems Engineering students, who are divided into 1) hardware design, 2) electrical circuitry and 3) software development sub-teams. Each team works in harmony to overcome the challenges had previously experienced, such as heavy weight, circuitry layout design, autonomous and user control modes, and better software interface. They designed and built a remote controlled excavator robot, that can collect and deposit a minimum of ten (10) kilograms of regolith simulant within 15 minutes. The developed robot with its innovative mining mechanisms and control system and software will assist NASA in enhancing the current methodologies used for space/planet exploration and resources’ mining especially the Moon and Mars. NASA’s going-on project aims to send exploration robots that collect resources for analysis before sending astronauts. In 2016, only 56 United State (US) teams were invited to participate, and DustyTRON was one of three university teams from the state of Texas, the team placed the 16th in overall performance. This paper will address the full engineering life-cycle process including research, concept design and development, constructing the robot and system closeout by delivering the team’s robot for the competition in Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Highlights
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the leader in space exploration the first robot landed on the moon
The NASA Robotic Mining Competition (RMC) encourages university students in the United States to be innovators and creative thinkers to design, build, and compete with robots that can traverse the simulated Martian chaotic terrain; excavate the basaltic regolith simulant and the ice simulant, which are a representation of the necessary resource on Mars and return the excavated mass for a deposit into the collector bin to simulate an offworld mining mission
On May 16-20, 2016, the seventh annual NASA Robotic Mining Competition was held at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida
Summary
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the leader in space exploration the first robot landed on the moon. On May 16-20, 2016, the seventh annual NASA Robotic Mining Competition was held at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida This event brings together student teams from universities across the US to compete in a real of robotics, remote operation, and automation challenge related to NASA missions. Texas A&M International University (TAMIU) DustyTRON Robotic team, known as DustyTRON 2.0, worked to fulfill the competition goals, according to NASA’s systems engineering guidelines and NASA RMC requirements [12-14]. This will mark the second entry into such competition and the team decided to build a new robot design from the ground up
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