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The Electrical sub-team is responsible for the design, assembly, and integration of the rover’s electronic systems, including custom printed circuit boards and cable harnesses. These PCBs are designed using Altium and vary in purpose from rover power distribution and its battery management to motor control modules for the robotic arm, and GPS receivers for navigation. The team performs detailed power calculations to ensure safe and efficient distribution across all subsystems while maintaining compliance with current and thermal limits. The sub-team is involved in testing and debugging, leveraging tools such as oscilloscopes, multimeters, and DC loads for validation. Members gain hands-on experience with PCB design software, harnessing, soldering and learn industry practices for PCB design such as signal integrity, grounding, and noise mitigation. Collaboration with other sub-teams is essential to define pin mappings, communication protocols, and power budgets, as well as to support firmware development and system-level testing. Through this process, members develop practical expertise in electronics design, and system-level integration.
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The Mechanical sub-team is responsible for the complete design and fabrication of the rover including chassis, suspension, wheels, arm, gearboxes, and composite linkages. The team leverages SOLIDWORKS CAD to design and validate components, utilizing finite element analysis and dynamic simulations to ensure robust designs before manufacturing and conducts prototyping and material testing during manufacturing. Additionally, the sub-team prepares detailed engineering drawings to ensure the parts are made to specifications and is responsible for manufacturing using machining skills such as the precision turning, milling, CNC milling, and fabrication methods such as TIG welding and composite manufacturing. Mechanical collaborates closely with other sub-team to integrate on-board science experiments and electrical systems while meeting software requirements.
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The science sub-team is responsible for developing experiments to detect signs of life, as well as key resources for sustaining life within soil. This includes the development of characterization tools and sensors, as well as biological or chemical assays. The experiments and instruments must be designed such that they can be used on the rover without any risk of spills or contamination. The team does extensive research into the Martian environment and common assays to be able to develop appropriate tests and subsequently write reports about the significance of the data.
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The software sub team is responsible for developing, testing, and maintaining all of the software for the rover. The team uses Robot Operating System (ROS) which contains software and middleware for building useful robotic applications. The software team is tasked with writing low-level firmware for custom motor controllers, power systems and other PCBs. Armed with high performance hardware such as NVIDIAs Jetson TX2 and AGX Orin, the sub-team implements and integrates advanced algorithms for GPS pose estimation, ArUco marker detection, autonomous navigation, inverse kinematics, and camera streaming.
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