Robotics

Lunar Soil Rover

Me and my partner Owen have attempted to solve a problem using Legos and a few motors, the problem of moving materials on the moon, specifically moving lunar soil or regolith, while me and Owen were researching this topic and the challenges associated with it we discovered that the lunar soil was magnetic and could be picked up with a magnet and that sparked our first idea, but this idea was quickly scrapped due to 1. How do you attach the magnet to the robot, and 2. Where do we get a magnet big enough and strong enough to pick up soil/sand. In the end our final idea didn't work but it is a prototype of what could be a functional robot. The robot is seen to the left and below.

This is a front view of our regolith-collecting robot

RegolithRobotVideo.MOV

This is a video of our robot attempting to collect sand.

Robot Code

This our code for our robot, what the robot was supposed to do is go forward until it detects soil/sand, then scooch forward a little, move its bucket down, then move it up to put it in the tray, repeat this 3 more times then turn around and head out. Unfortunately, the sensor didn't sense the sand and it plowed itself into it.

Me and Owen designed the robot to be decently simple, but it turned out to be a little more complicated. We were originally going to try to figure out how to get it to move around terrain, but that proved very difficult for us to accomplish, so we made it go over terrain, but how do you get it to not stop when going over terrain, but stop to pick up mounds of soil. Me and Owen were still racking our brains to figure this out when we saw the actual test ground, it was just a straight line to sand, so I told Owen that I was going to scrap the whole code, I said that I'll be done in a minute, and he agreed and I came up with the code seen above. Although it didn't work I think \ it worked better than it would've with our original code.

In conclusion, although our robot didn't work it would work in theory, and a theory can expand and change to make sense and eventually work.

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