Category: Mimas Rover

With a precise design of the final look of the wheels ready, materials for building it were purchased and assembled. The structure is composed of: 1x stainless steel cylinder for the outer frame, 4x "U" shaped stainless steel holed brackets custom bent, 4x "L" shaped stainless steel brackets. In addition, several nuts and bolts were used to make the structure strong and flexible, ready to be adjusted, if necessary, in the future. The structure of the wheel, however, is far from being completed, since it will require a cover of polyurethane rubber to protect the metal and ensure the rover has a better grip on outdoor terrains.

• [Hours of work: 3h]
• [People involved: Giorgio]

To design Mimas, two NASA/JPL Mars Rovers were taken as inspiration: Curiosity and Perseverance. They are both autonomous vehicles for planetary exploration, landed on Mars respectively in 2012 and 2021. On both rovers, the Rocker Bogie suspension system was implemented to ensure safe driving even when traversing a rough surface, covered by rocks and with different terrain compositions. A first draft of the structure was modelled in 3D using Blender, however, this design may undercome several improvements in the future. In addition, materials to assemble one of the wheels (one out of six) were purchased.

• [Hours of work: 16h]
• [People involved: Giorgio]

The first step to transit from the RC-VSTB to Mimas, the mars rover model prototyped for this Honours Project, was to update from a Raspberry Pi 1 to a Raspberry Pi 4 (with 8 GB of RAM) This process required a relatively small amount of time, however, particular attention was made to keeping the device as light and smooth as possible, reducing the installed libraries to what is strictly necessary.

• [Hours of work: 2h]
• [People involved: Giorgio]