Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 3 No. 2 Summer 2018 | Page 44

RED PLANET ROBOTICS Team makes University Rover Challenge finals For the Virginia Tech Red Planet Robotics team, winning was getting to the 2018 University Rover Challenge final. The team was the first ever from VT to compete at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, coming in 29th overall. In all, 36 teams competed in the finals of the compe- tition May 31 to June 2, representing universities from 10 countries, including 1st and 3rd place Poland. “When we formed the team we had two goals,” said Cornelius Leary, team leader and mechanical engineer- ing senior who graduates in December. “The first was to design a rover as part of our senior capstone project, and the second was to compete in the [URC]finals.” Making the finals wasn’t a given. In November 2017, 95 teams had applied, but only 36 made it to Utah. “We knew we had the support structure to dive in at the start of the competition cycle,” Leary said. “By the finals we had spent months testing and fixing whatever we could to maximize the points we could earn.” Software issues and an unfortunate bump of an emer- gency stop button, cost the team valuable time during MOMENTUM the competition. Damage to the rover’s arm base motor also complicated the task. “Over the course of three days we made some invalu- able changes to the rover that resulted in success for our final task,” Leary said. “We were able to collect a sample from just below the simulated Martian surface, and perform a battery of on-board and off-rover tests.” Despite the setbacks, Leary said the team learned a lot about not only the competition, but robotics/mecha- tronics design in general. “If we had known what we know now about the competition, we might have spent some of our design time differently, but we’ll pass that knowledge along to next year’s team,” he said. The team consisted of: Leary, Anthony Wagner, Nash Kocur, Franco Honores, Sebastian Villacis, Rehan Khan, Jhonatan Lavayen, and Yifei Lang of mechanical engineering; Eric McAchren and Julianna Neumann of electrical engineering; Andrew Beckwith, computer engineering; and Cara Herwig, materials science and engineering. The team’s senior design video can be found on the ME YouTube channel. SUMMER 2018 PAGE 44