Robot Design Proposal

In sending a robot to the moon, there are several things that need to be considered.  We took these into account when designing our robot.  The robot needs to be durable, so we reinforced the connections on ours to make it strong.  It needs to last as long as possible, so our design is simple, because the fewer parts it has, the fewer parts there are that can break.  It takes a long time and costs a lot of money to send a repairman to the moon. The robot needs to get around the rocky terrain without getting stuck on moon rocks or crater ridges, so it is spider-shaped with long legs. Moon dust would clog the gears, so our robot has no gears.

Because the terrain on the moon is uneven and there are many craters and rocks, we gave our robot a low center of gravity so that it can’t tip over easily. It needs to be transported to the moon without using a lot of fuel, so we designed it to be lightweight. It needs to go over bumpy ground, so it has four big wheels. It has three motors: two to drive two of the wheels, and another to operate the fork-arm manipulator.  This manipulator will be used to harvest the water and helium 3 elements. It is designed to pick up the elements and has a mechanism to “catch” the elements so that they won’t fall off once they’re harvested. We put these sensors on our robot: a touch sensor, a light sensor, and a temperature sensor. An ultrasonic sensor would not work on the moon (It uses sound and there is none on the moon.), but we might put one on our robot for the game board. We will also have a camera on our robot. It will be interesting to see things from a robot’s point of view.

We believe that our robot has the necessary features to navigate the MoonBots terrain.  We’ve done a lot of research on the conditions on the moon, and have designed our robot to work well under those conditions. A nice clean environment made up of LEGO elements will be no problem for our robot to work in.  While the details of the game board have not yet been released, we’re confident that we have a solid robot design.  We will be able to make modifications to our design and use our NXT programming skills to accomplish whatever tasks are thrown our way in phase 2. We’re excited about the outreach activity, as we’re eager to share our love of science and math with others in our community.

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