LAUREN PLATT

Themed Entertainment Engineer

-Cambridge Dynamics-

Project Overview

"Building a Lunar Base: NASA is working to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon within the next decade to uncover new scientific discoveries and lay the foundation for private companies to build a lunar economy. Artemis is the twin sister of Apollo. The US will go back to the Moon. This time we will build a community. Can we build the necessary infrastructure?"

I worked with a team of three other students in MIT's course 2.12 Introduction to Robotics (Team Cambridge Dynamics) to modify an existing robot base to excavate, transport, and dump "lunar regolith." Our final design was a robot with a front scoop that could raise and lower using lead screws, tilt using winch and drum, and dump out regolith using a rake and lead screws. Our robot was tele-operated using a joystick.

Collection Concept Ideation

I suggested our first concept for a regolith collection mechanism which was a device that would suck up and shoot out the regolith like a vacuum. The vacuum was a unique idea and could have been improved with better sealing the mechanism, but overall it wasn't collecting regolith fast enough and it needed to be plugged in which we couldn't do on the moon. Therefore, we began testing other concepts.

A bucket design was promising since it could collect a lot of regolith at once.

Driving Discussion

We tested driving over regolith and it had difficulty with the given tires. They lost too much traction when they drove over the regolith. It would be a big issue if our robot got stuck in the regolith during the competition, so we opted to swap the tires for larger ones.

Prototyping and Development

Our first prototype consisted of three subsystems: rake, bucket lifter, and chassis. 

I worked most on the construction, mounting, and testing of the bucket mechanism. I also did the wiring for the motors.  

Ultimately, we faced difficulties with the rake. We found that it was not really necessary to have a rake to pull regolith into the bucket. If we drove into the mountains of regolith, the buckets would fill well just from driving. Actually the rake more often got in the way and made it more difficult to collect regolith. It was a helpful concept for pushing regolith into the bucket, though, so we changed the rake to be a curved shape that sits on the inside of the bucket and does not help to rake regolith in, but does help to rake regolith out of the bucket.

We tested removing the rake entirely, but that left valuable regolith inside of the bucket

Final Competition

Our robot ended up collecting the most regolith out of all 6 teams in the competition! We collected over three times the required amount with time to spare and the amount of regolith that we collected actually broke the scale! We were very proud of our robot's performance and our work as a team.

Contact

508-404-3168  |  leplatt@andrew.cmu.edu  |  Pittsburgh, PA  |  https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurenelizabethplatt/