Brainstorming, Research, Goals

Eunice and I will be working on primarily building a rover for our Mission to Mars project over the next few weeks.

Goals:

• To educate users about the Mars rovers and NASA's Rover program
• Teach users how to program through Picoblocks
• Teach users about how sensors work and the different types that exist
• Possibly teach users about proportional and bang-bang control
• This will depend on the amount of time we decide our exhibit should take for users, what our target user audience is, and what knowledge that we assume that they will have before they begin this exhibit

Our goal is to create an exhibit that will prompt users to program commands for the rover to accomplish using its sensors.  We plan on asking users to program the rover to leave the docking facility, travel across a ditch, collect a rock sample, travel up a hill, take a picture at the top of the hill, and return to the docking facility successfully.

Design:

We plan on building a rover that is similar to the one used by NASA to help gather interest in the program

(Taken from http://marsrover.nasa.gov/gallery/artwork/rover1browse.html)

Our rover will be primarily built from Legos for the wheels and lower body section.  However, we also plan on incorporating Delrin pieces for the body of the rover and possibly PVC pipes for the head.  We also plan on simulating the Mars terrain by creating a landscape for the rover to travel across.  This terrain will be built out of Styrofoam and will contain a ditch and hill as mentioned in one of our goals.

For the sensors, we will use the ultrasonic and touch sensors.  It wouldn't make sense to include the line sensor since there are no lines on Mars for the robot to follow.  Since one of our goals is to have users collect a rock sample, we will build a mechanical arm on the robot for that purpose. The arm will be built out of lego gears, lego parts, a motor, and some delrin for some parts.