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
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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
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