Autonomous Planetary Rover Team Final Project Report

This design team was tasked to develop autonomous movement, sensing, and navigation capabilities on a rover platform developed by a summer research team working under Dr. Kevin Nickels. The rover is comprised of four subsystems that strive to meet the requirements by establishing movement capabilities through power delivery and control, odometry feedback of the wheels, obstacle detection, and navigation. This report evaluated each design against the requirement they were intended to meet. The following report describes the final design of each of these subsystems, explains the testing performed on each subsystem, and evaluates the results of these tests against the design requirements. The design constraints of rover size and budget are maintained by our final design by delivering a final design that fits through a standard CSI doorframe, and not exceeding the total budget of $2400. The final deliverable satisfies the requirements of battery specifications, incline traversal, display of map and estimated position, and obstacle detection. The final design failed to demonstrate an ability to traverse over an obstacle of 2 inches. The team was unable to demonstrate completion of the remaining requirements because of significant failures of the motors described later in the report. In the process of delivering the project requirements, extensive modifications and redesigns to the provided platform were necessary. The frame received from the project sponsor was in a nonfunctional state. The team performed significant modifications to the rover frame to allow for proper movement of the rover. Also, the provided motor drivers failed in preliminary testing, requiring the team to experimentally evaluate the operational requirements of the motors and select and integrate new motor drivers into the final design. Overall, the team delivered a functioning prototype that met many of the project requirements, and all the design constraints. The rover was able to move, detect obstacles, and plan navigation through an environment. Unfortunately, the motors suffered a thermally induced failure during testing, precluding the completion of the remaining tests