ENAE488R: Topics in Aerospace Engineering; Planetary Rover Development

This was a set of classes from 2011-2016 that I mentor/co-taught with Dr. David L. Akin at the University of Maryland.

The class was a design-build-test class to build a teleoperated rover for undergraduates to compete in the NASA RASC-AL RoboOps competition. This student competition was hosted by NASA’s RASC-AL program to design, build and test a rover to be tele-operated from the team’s home institution. The competition involved navigating the JSC rock yard to use the onboard robotic arm of the rover to sample objects of interest (Painted rocks) and bring them back to the origin point within the run time limit.

In the class students were taught the basics of rover design, teleoperation, and the basics of robotic arm control. Having to be teleoperated from the home institution, the students had to deal with the problems of time delay and limited data bandwidth. The students were tasked with designing and building a rover to compete in the competition using the technical material presented in the course. Following the design phase the student team would build the rover and test in the UMD Space Systems Lab moon yard and rover sandbox. The students would then travel to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX to compete in the competition.

Below are several videos from the multiple years of competitions that the UMD students competed in the competition. The first video is from the competition organizer, NASA RASC-AL followed by videos from the UMD teams:

UMD Videos: