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NASA's Robotic Space Mining Competition (RMC) is a challenge with the goal of putting surface level mining robots on the moon and Mars. Each year 50 universities around the US compete in this challenge to see who can mine the most "Icy regolith" while maintaining a design that could be applicable on an environment such as the moon or Mars.
2020 COMPETITION
2020 - 2022 Covid took over most of the 2020 - 2021 season. However we were able to compete again in 2022. This was our teams best season while I was a part of the team. I was able help lead the controls team to win the Autonomy award for having 90% autonomous operation. This was acomplished by using the HTC vive laser tracker, and controllers to allow for accurate positioning of the robot while in the areana. In addition to this, we also had a Lidar to detect objects in front of the robot, and fully autonomous mining and offload. This allowed our robot to operate mostly hands free with only minor corrections throughout the competition. Unfortuantely we underwent mechanical difficulties that caused the robot to break in our second run leading to a low overall score.
2019 Competition
2019 Competition
2018-2019 was another awesome year on the now re-branded Cardinal Space Mining Team. Unfortunately NASA was unable to host the competition at the Kennedy Space center this year due to the 50th anniversary of the Apollo program!!! however In conjunction with Caterpillar, the University of Alabama was able to host the competition. In this years competition we improved upon our MARS series of robots by strengthening our trencher, and improving the reliability of our controls system. Additionally we added the addition of a bucket ladder system that converted the single trencher system from Pavonis into a multi stage system. The trencher would now pull material up to the surface while the bucket ladder would carry that material up to the hopper.
Oh yeah, the robot also looked way cooler with its massive chainsaw!!!
MARS-2 : Marineris
MARS-1 : Pavonis (Falcon 9 in the background)
2018 Competition
2018 Competition
2017-2018 was my first year at Iowa State University and my first year on the Cyclone Space Mining team. I learned a ton about how this team operated and more specifically the mechanics behind mining regolith. Up to this point, I was constrained heavily by FIRST robotics rules and restrictions with regards to motors, electronics, and software. However the NASA rules are much broader allowing for a much larger range of designs. I was one of the 5 or 6 control members responsible for designing the controls system of Pavonis. This was where I created the SPARC PCBs listed in my projects page. The robot itself was more of a proof of concept this year as it was the first year we were required to mine the "icy regolith" that is represented by gravel. We opted for a trencher design to pull the gravel up to the surface. There were several design oversights that were accounted for and fixed the next year with MARS-2
Robot Naming
Robot Naming
One fun thing we do each year is name our robot. We give the robots both a series/mission name, as well as an individual name. Before 2018 the mission name was the Hermes mission and we had names like ketchup and mustard because we had multiple robots painted red and yellow. But in 2018 we were given new rules and thus our mission name changed. We decided to name our new mission MARS as mining the "Icy regolith" is essential if we plan on colonizing on Mars. With this series of robots we decided the individual name should be related to mars and as such each robots name is a geographical location or object on Mars.
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