14 Jun Colorado School of Mines, Week 1

This is Brown Hall where the RoSE lab is located

This summer I got the amazing opportunity to work with a team of students here at The School of Mines in the RoSE Lab (Robotics Space Exploration). My first week here at The Colorado School of Mines has been amazing. I arrived on Saturday June 6th and spent my day exploring Golden, Colorado. The next day Luke Fritsche and Gunnar Robinson arrived and I showed them around. I am here with Luke and we are working with Hayden Crawford and Dr. Frankie Zhu and a team of other students on building the IPEx rover from NASA.

Luke and Evan in the RoSE lab

This week was all about research, we need to find parts that we can use to build the rover. The IPEx rover made by NASA is built to excavate an area and build berms to protect surrounding people, rockets, and buildings from other landing rockets. We arrived at the lab on Monday and immediately had a list of research to do. We were split up into team that will work on the different subsystems of the rover, I worked on the avionics subsystem about the brain and sensors of the rover. I was tasked with finding sensors to make sure we know what is happening to the rover at all times. I found sensors for temperature to make sure the rover electronics don’t overheat, voltage and current sensors so we can make sure the battery is outputting correctly, but the most challenging issue I had was to sense how much lunar regolith (Moon Dirt) was in the drums after excavation. I came up with three solutions to this problem, the first being the use of a current shunt amplifier to sense how much current the motor lifting the arm is drawing to suspend the drum and regolith in the air, second we could use foil strain gauges to detect how much the arm is bending under the load of the regolith, third option is we could put load cells into the drum and using a slip ring to connect them to weigh how much regolith is in the drum. Around halfway through the week I was given a new task on if and why we should use what’s called a Teensy 4.1 to control the wheel motors. I found through my research that the Teensy would be a better controller for the drivetrain because it was able to process faster more precise controls for multiple motors compared to what we are using as the main brain for the rover. I have had a lot of fun researching all these parts and deep diving into how these electronics work and how we can connect them.

Tape Diagram of the IPEx rover

Learning how to Solder

We have meetings every Wednesday with the whole team to discuss what is happening to each subsystem and where we are in the research process. This Wednesday we had a special meeting to talk about all the other projects that are happening in the RoSE lab. We also got a tour of MLSS (the lunar test bed) that is used to test rovers in simulated conditions that would be found on the moon. After the meetings on Wednesday I was waiting for Luke in the halls and a professor walked by asking if I was here for the soldering class that was just down the hall. I told him I wish I was and he told me to come anyway, I waited for Luke and we walked down he introduced himself and gave a brief summary on himself but talked so fast I didn’t catch his name before he said he had to go teach a class. We had little soldering kits to learn and I came back later that day and learned to solder on an R2D2 board with an LED light. The last two days this week I was tasked to find the rough dimensions of the rover so we have an I idea of the size we are working with to make sure all the other components of the rover would fit.

A hill I found overlooking Golden, CO

After a day at the lab Luke, Gunnar, and I would go to the rec center to go swimming in an amazing pool. We’d come home to cook dinner and sit around the table to talk about our day. After this I would go on nighttime bike rides all over the golden area. Golden has Bike paths and trails all over the place and each night I will explore a new trail or path, I have found some amazing trails and beautiful views. One of my rides Luke came along and we rode to the top of the mesa north of golden and could see the whole city of Golden all the Way to downtown Denver. This first week has been super fun and I am super exited for the upcoming weeks while I am here!