Nasa Robotic Mining

Abdulaziz Al Badi

Christian Haworth

Project advisor:

Dr. Marius Silaghi

Client

• Our client is the Aerospace NASA Lunabotics Engineering Competition(LEC) team division. Our boss is yet to be determined by the Aerospace Team.

 Development Meeting Schedule

• During the semester the CSE meetings will be held on Mondays and Wednesdays at 11:00 am to make sure progress is being made on the project. We also plan to meet with the whole group on Thursdays at 1 pm as of right now to make sure our contributions are exactly what the client needs.

 Goals and Motivations

• The motivation behind this project is to further improve upon the work done by the people before us. This year, we all believe that we can create an autonomous robot that can perform the tasks laid out in the NASA LEC guidelines.

approach

• Our system will implement these three key features into the robot:
• Manually controllable robot actions for all major motors (navigation, claw, conveyor belt) through Xbox wireless controller.
• Object detection for future autonomous navigation functionality using a camera.
• Fully autonomous sample collection, navigation, and deposition system using manual�controls implemented in feature two as backup.

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 Novel Features & Functionalities

• A novelty feature in this project would definitely be the autonomy of the robot. Even though we are still far away from achieving that goal, I believe that having an autonomous robot will be a huge breakthrough for this team. There is a massive difference between having a controllable robot that simply takes input from a controller, and having a robot that does all the work for you when you turn it on. There has yet to be a fully autonomous robot that can do all of the tasks on its own, so getting anywhere near full automation will be a huge achievement.

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Technical challenges

• The technical challenges for this semester will be using new APIs, that we have no experience with, to interface with the camera for object detection and motor controls. We also have very limited experience with object detection and automation, so we will need to learn how to do these processes while applying them to our project. We will have to learn how to use the robot simulation to run our code and make sure everything is working properly. Lastly we will have to figure out how to maintain good interdisciplinary communications between the different majors so that everyone is on the same page of what's going on and what needs to be done.

Project Milestone Outlines

• Milestone 1 Outline
• Create a virtual environment in which we can test robot controls on a simulated level.
•  Milestone 2 Outline
• The second milestone would be to implement the controller for the robot
•  Milestone 3 Outline
• The third milestone will be to implement the camera’s vision into the code,

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Questions?