Danger!

Engineers at work

I'm doing my best to stay above water and maintain the site while still leading the project. Hopefully I'll be able to update once a week as competition approaches.

MAY 8 2008 - UPDATE:

The Engineering Alumni Association Studentm Project poster fair was last night and while we didn't have a poster, we did have the alpha build of ROVER on hand and did some driving (until we burned the motors out. Haven't figured out if it was because of weight or shaft loading), and demo'd the vision system. The next step is to write compression software for the video stream and failure recovery routines for software glitches. Pics of the alpha build of the chassis can be found on the Mars Rover Challenge link in the navigation bar.

 

MAY 13 2008

We're happy to announce that we've added another sponsor to our list. Labsphere is a maker of high quality spectroscopy calibration materials, and has been generous enough to donate a few squares of spectralon to our team for use in our science package. Point Grey is also donating a CCTV lens and auto-iris connector for the DragonFly2 Color Camera they donated a few months ago.

In other news, we're now pursuing two options for our manipulator: a high power, 3-segment arm driven by brushed dc gearmotors, and a lightweight arm made of formed sheet metal and driven by high torque hobby servos. Should have that done by next week hopefully.