Lunar Robotics
VT Astrobotics is an advanced design team, requiring collaboration from across disciplines, including mining engineering, computer science, electrical engineering, and more! It is the culmination of many hardworking students as well as faculty advisors that results in a robot we can all be proud of.
VT Astrobotics' WebsiteTo avoid obstacles, such as large rocks, the first step is knowing where they are. A great way to do this is with computer vision, because this lets us identify both how large the object is as well as where it is located relative to our robot. Using my code, now we can autonomously pathfind around obstacles (The gif is just an example with objects on my floor).
OpenCV DocsClick the arrow on the right to explore!
We researched and bought the best individual cells for our needs. Specifically based on power capacity (Wh) and mass (g).
While the cells were coming in, I designed a basic battery mount in SolidWorks
We rotated through testing each cell's voltage, wrapping groups of cells in Kapton tape, cutting nickel strips, and spot welding them together.
After we made two packs, I soldered on connections to our BMS. This was a very delicate process because if I heated the Li-Ion batteries too much they could explode.
To program our robot, we are using the Robot Operating System (ROS2) framework. ROS is an open source node-based framework, designed to be used with a combination of Python and C++ on a Linux machine. Since most people don't own a dedicated computer running Linux, you can download a virtual machine running Linux.
More About ROS