NASA Robo-Ops Mechanical Team

Robo-Ops is an annual NASA sponsored collegiate completion designed to foster innovation in the field of extraterrestrial rover design. Competing teams must construct and operate a rover capable of collecting rock samples from a surrogate Martian environment. The College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Wyoming intends to field a team to compete in the 2016 Robo-Ops competition. As a senior design group within the Mechanical Engineering department, we developed a novel dual-rover design, and constructed a prototype rover to demonstrate the validity of our approach. Our prototype consists of a 7 wheeled articulated suspension, a 3+1 degree of freedom serial arm, a chassis, and preliminary electrical components.