Weighing in at just over 26 Kilograms, the ultralight Atlas4 uses it's uniquely designed wheels to dig lunar soil, and collects this soil into a collection bin located directly in the middle of the robot. Once the robot is full of regolith, the robot then raises its midsection into an angled position, letting the lunar soil it has collected fall gently towards a conveyer belt located at one end, primed and ready for depositing. While the robot is pitched in this way, the wheels then operate as traditional wheels, allowing the robot to traverse the arena back towards an official dumping bin hanging just off the far side of the arena. After the robot backs up to the dumping area, it starts the conveyer, and dumps the soil it has collected to officially score mining points in the competition Round. Once the Robot has dumped all of its lunar soil into the bin, the Robot turns completely around and the entire process starts over again and repeats until 10 minutes are up.

 

One of the more innovative areas of the robot include it's 3d printed wheels, and the use of plastics and carbon fiber to implement it's unique structure. Each wheel is made up of 7 interlocking 3d printed pieces which fit and work together like a puzzle in order to become a larger wheel which will collect soil and allow that soil to fall through into the interior of the robot. The puzzle like design is a direct response to getting around a key design issue; the issue that the maximum size of an object which can be printed in a makerbot 3d printer is much smaller than the final size of the wheels the robot needed. We estimate that over 80% of the robot is made of some kind of plastic like material, lending it to become one of the lightest robot designs at the NASA competition this year. This is an important area of design for NASA as well, since it has recently been exploring how to 3d print objects in space. (See 3D-Printing In Space)

 

The robot itself operates in a sealed environment. The BP-1 simulant used to simulate real regolith is such a fine powder that teams and judges must dawn hazmat suits and special protective respiratory gear in order to enter the designated regolith filled arena and set up each robot for their run. Therefore, each college separates their teams into 2 groups, those who are controlling the robot from the command center, and those who operate and set up the robot in the arena. The teams are then allowed to communicate back and forth via walkie-talkie.

 

In terms of communications, the robot is monitored and tele-operated via wify from a command computer running Labview in an isolated trailer 50 yards away from the arena. Labview is also used by Spacex for their own rocket launch software (http://www.reddit.com/comments/1853ap) The Robot itself is actually controlled with an Xbox 360 controller, something many young college students might be familiar with or already have a natural feel for. The software on the robot, which was designed entirely from scratch, contains fault detection checksums and a heartbeat "ping", as well as a watchdog timer on both ends of the data transmissions looking for possible errors and signal cutouts. The robot even has an auto-reconnect feature, for times in which the signal is weak, the robot will sense it has lost the connection and attempt to reconnect immediately with the command center and update an alarm panel on the screen. The robots robust alarm system contains a multitude of alarm codes for data, voltage and motor stress issues. As an easter egg, the alarm codes are numbered using a similar alarm numbering scheme as the Apollo Lunar Module (e.g the infamous "1201" and "1202" alarms). This numbering scheme has a practical purpose as well, since all robot communications are monitored by NASA and teams are deducted points for excessive communications, smaller codes are used in tandum with lookup tables in order to display a more "verbose" meaning to alarm messages received on the control panel. In other words, it pays to be brief.

 

The holy grail in this competition is not just mining regolith, but achieving "full autonomy" which is defined as having a robot in which the operator presses "go" at the beginning of the round, and the robot navigates the terrain and mines and deposits regolith on its own for the next 10 minutes without any human intervention on the teams behalf. This is a key milestone Team Atlas is shooting to achieve next year, and they need innovative students to help them do it.