đź’« SOLIDWORKS
đź’« Manufacturing
đź’« Assembly
đź’« Interdisciplinary Experience
đź’« Competition Experience
đź’« Budgeting
⚡ Steep learning curve
⚡ Schoolwork/extracurricular balance
During the 22-23 school year, I began work on upgrading the drivetrain on “Faraday”, the McMaster Mars Rover Team’s first-ever rover. On a limited budget, weight constraints, and a time crunch, we were tasked with improving the drivetrain to accomplish the following objectives:
By April 2023, all of these objectives were accomplished within budget and by August, the drive train powered through all 5 tasks at the Canadian International Rover Competition (CIRC) enabling the team to achieve #1 Canadian Team and #4/17 Internationally.
Our design featured a rocker-bogie system with 6 directly driven pneumatic wheels, along with in-house manufactured L-brackets and shielding. These features proved to be reliable, sturdy, and effective for each task. The drive train enabled Faraday to survive even the harshest of conditions and become Canada’s top-performing rover.
We first had to decide what wheels we were going to use for our design. After researching various viable options based on data from prior competitions, we decided on AndyMark pneumatic wheels.
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Once our wheels were selected, we went through with an L-bracket design to enable direct drive. Upon manufacturing and testing of the drivetrain, we determined that the motor shaft had too strong of a bending moment. We also found that the motors would occasionally scrape the ground at awkward angles. Thus, work on an additional bracket to correct the moment and shielding was underway.
The shielding proved more complex than originally intended due to wiring issues. Certain motors had to be oriented differently causing their encoders to jut out facing downwards towards the shields rather than up and away. We then designed the shields to accommodate the extra space the encoders would take while not making the shields too big so that they would scratch the ground. The second bracket was positioned to provide support much closer to the shaft to greatly reduce the bending moment. Learning to manufacture curved objects proved to be challenging too, as our in-house mill could not be used to digitally space clearance holes due to the curvature. Additionally, learning how to install countersinks was new. Thus, specially designed 3D printed parts were used as a map to make hand drilling more accurate and ensure proper spacing. All in all, through brainstorming sessions and interdisciplinary communication, we were able to get the drive train up and running with great success.