UA Student Robotic Rover Team Among Best in Nation
Student team is among only seven in the country that qualified to design and build a planetary rover and demonstrate it at NASA's "Rock Yard."
The XSV rover and some team members, from left to right: Lane Ellwood, Jesse Odle, Jordan Odle, and Brandon Pitts.
UA Engineering students recently won $10,000 funding to compete in a new NASA robotics competition.
Only seven teams in the nation qualified for the National Institute of Aerospace award, which enabled them to design and build a planetary rover and demonstrate its capabilities at the NASA Johnson Space Center's Rock Yard in Houston in May 2011.
NASA's multi-acre Rock Yard, officially known as the Planetary Analog Test Site, simulates lunar and Martian landscapes and is used by NASA to test habitats, rovers, and spacesuits.
NASA and the National Institute of Aerospace established the new student rover competition, snappily titled "Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts, Academic Linkage, Exploration Robo-Ops," aka Rascal, to test the robot-building skills of university students, and to spark interest in planetary rovers and robotics.
The competition required the rover to negotiate obstacles and traverse difficult terrain, and to identify and collect various colored rocks while being controlled via broadband from "mission control" at UA.
Teams also had to submit a technical paper to support their rover projects, and the UA team scored the highest among the seven finalists for its technical paper.
"This was our first time in a robotics competition," said Brandon Pitts, Rascal team member and aerospace engineering junior. "We were competing against teams that had master's and PhD students, so we were shocked when we got the highest score for our paper."