Just before midnight Saturday, one day before the final presentation, the project came to a dead stop.
The following Monday, the student aerospace engineering team was scheduled to perform a live test of their prototype land exploration rover to a high-profile client. But the microcontroller—the circuit board that commands the rover—was fried.
The team’s capstone project, a Descending/Ascending Rover for Exploration (DARE), is one of 10 practicum design projects for undergraduate seniors in the Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences. Over two semesters, students design, build and test a system for an industry customer.
The DARE team’s client was NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the nation’s leading center for robotic space and earth exploration.
Over the past six years, JPL has partnered with CU’s aerospace senior design projects by requisitioning a family of rovers. Previous teams have developed a mother rover, which is a communication hub and docking station for child rovers that collect data from the terrestrial surface. Each new team builds on previous designs.
This year JPL asked the student team to create a child rover that could navigate 20-30 feet of rough terrain and climb steep slopes up to 70 degrees, with the goal of collecting data in canyons and volcanic craters. - See more at:http://www.colorado.edu/news/features/student-designed-rover-built-nasa-...