mission-martian

We aim to integrate EV3 Robotics to increase public awareness and attraction to ongoing and future Mars rover missions. Our program will not only entertain people from every age but also educate them about the endeavors of a Mars rover mission. We want to bring Curiosity, Opportunity, ExoMars and many others into people’s lives. To achieve our goal, we first built a robot that can perform similar tasks that of a real Mars rover. The best way for us to do that was by using Mindstorm EV3. By the help of LEGO building sets, we tried to build a functioning drill, sample collecting tool and collision avoiding system. 8 engines were used in the model to make robot’s movements as alike as possible to that of Curiosity and ExoMars. We placed a camera on the rover that sends direct live feed to the user to simulate the perspective of mission control. Robotic arm is able to move 360 degrees in both vertical and horizontal axis to collect drilled sample on highest efficiency. There are ultrasonic sensors around the model that measures the distance with potential obstacles and targets, their height and width to consider whether it is surmountable or must be avoided. Benefiting from gyro sensors, model can make perfect turns, and that provides us to ignore any friction-based miscalculations about the coordinates of the model. Data and operations required for completing those tasks can sometimes exceed EV3’s limits, therefore we needed to use 2 of those processors. And with the help of light and color sensors, we achieved synching those two EV3’s by sending and receiving light signals in binary form. Sometimes LEGO building sets were not comprehensive enough for us so we designed and 3D printed our own parts that were essential to us such as the drilling machine and some advanced wheels. With the help of those printers we combine 3D models and LEGO to create our model Mars rover. The other main building block of our project is the interactive software that we designed for the users. The software has direct access to the rover and the user is presented with tasks to complete that are similar to Mars rover mission tasks. While the robots performs a particular task, the software will give information to the user about that task. With the instructions in the software and with the user friendly interface, we hope to make it possible and attractive for the public to build and use their own Mars rovers at their homes.

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