OSU robotics team snatches first place

Robotics team built Rover to compete in simulated Mars mission against seven teams

By: Robert Ingle

Posted: 7/9/08

Competing for the first time at the 2008 University Rover Challenge, the Oregon State University Robotics Club surpassed expectations and was crowned champion in the event held June 5-7 at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah.
The annual rover challenge, hosted by the Mars Society, involves students designing their own Mars Rover to complete geology, soil characterization, emergency navigation, and construction tasks.
These tasks range from attaching bolts on a control panel to navigating through desert terrain to find a "distressed astronaut" from up to 1.5 kilometers away, all while being remote controlled via visual information passed from an onboard camera.
Ben Goska, a junior in electrical and computer engineering and driver for the Oregon State team, found that driving the rover was much more tedious then playing a video game, despite using a Sony Playstation 2 controller to operate the vehicle.
"When driving, I would sit down in a little tent where I couldn't see anything outside, and all that was in front of me were two screens, the TV sending video signals from the rover's camera and the laptop which gave all the data," Goska said.
"Driving [the rover] was one of the most stressful things I've done, because I knew that if I screwed up, everyone was watching, and I was driving around a project that everyone had been working on for months."
The OSU team had several design aspects that drove their robot to the front of the pack, including the use of a gasoline-powered hydraulic engine rather then the normal battery-and-electric-motor approach. Team members recognize this aspect of the rover as being extremely beneficial as it enabled them to move rapidly over the rough desert terrain.
Another design feature that separated the OSU rover from the competition of seven other teams was that it did not have moving parts in its main control system. Instead of using a delicate laptop as the main control like many of the other teams, the OSU team, exclusively comprising electrical and computer engineering students, designed and implemented their own system.
"The fact that our main control on our rover had no moving parts allowed us to run over bumps and not worry about it," Goska said. "It set us way apart because we could take really rough terrain, as tough as our mechanical frame could handle."
Matt Shuman, a graduate student in electrical and computer engineering and leader of the OSU Rover Project, notes that one requirement to be successful in the challenge is to meet certain engineering criteria.
"A good robot consists of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science working together," Shuman said. "What separated us is that we made sure to address each one of those categories on the robot."
The Oregon State team was able to accomplish this feat despite having no mechanical engineers on the approximately fifteen-member crew, a fact the team would like to change next year. Shuman hopes that expanding the team with students from different engineering fields will be a great learning experience for other OSU engineers in addition to benefiting the team.
The OSU team, with support from the Oregon NASA Space Grant Consortium, AJK Precision Sheet Metal, OSU Engineering and Parallax, Inc., a Sacramento, Calif. robotics company, plans to send another rover to the competition next year with the hope of topping this year's winning performance.
Some design tinkering and the addition of technical flair are areas where the team hopes to improve, but Shuman maintains that simple design, original ideas and lots of testing will make the team a favorite for the 2009 challenge.