Designs for a cargo-carrying helicopter and a lunar rover recently earned national acclaim for two teams of engineering students, who collectively placed first in three competitions last month.
A group of 29 undergraduates nabbed two awards for its three-wheeled, robotic-armed rover. Another team’s method for carrying heavy, bulky items via helicopter topped a competing design from students at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
For the lunar project, a collaboration with Arizona State University students, teams were tasked with developing “an astronaut-assisting rover that would carry tools and help astronauts,” said Kevin Buckley, a recent aerospace engineering graduate who was on the team.
The aluminum rover, dubbed the Robotic Assist Vehicle for Extraterrestrial Navigation, or RAVEN, can be remote-controlled, carry heavy equipment and scout an area’s safety ahead of an astronaut using its built-in cameras. Astronauts are often uncoordinated in space and weighed down by cumbersome suits; the rover would help them complete their missions more easily, Buckley said.
The team submitted the design to two NASA competitions, the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate MOONTASKS and the Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts Academic Linkage competitions, for aerospace engineering Capstone courses — and it won both.
The RAVEN was “one of the few” rovers that was actually built and functioning. Other teams submitted their designs on paper, said Wayne Yu, a recent aerospace engineering graduate also on the team.
“When asked if our design choices are valid, if it could climb a hill, we could actually prove it,” Yu said. Also, the rover’s three-wheel design saved space and weight, which helped the team beat 10 competitors in the RASC-AL competition.
“It was the hardest and most rewarding experience of my college years,” Buckley said. “Winning was certainly a relief.”
Another group of students will visit a NASA facility in Arizona where the agency tests space-bound rovers, in an attempt to make the award-winning design more lunar-compatible. They will see how it fares “in a simulated environment more similar to the lunar surface than the streets of [Washington],” Buckley added.
For the helicopter project, entered in the annual American Helicopter Society Student Design Competition, six graduate students and one undergraduate spent about four months designing a system that involved multiple helicopters working together to lift heavy items, said J. Gordon Leishman, an engineering professor who advised the team.
“You can only build helicopters so big,” Leishman said, adding that a single helicopter is generally able to carry five tons.
The team designed a system in which a load would be suspended from a truss between two helicopters, which the team’s report said would allow the helicopters to jointly carry a 20-ton container more than 100 miles in hot weather.
In lieu of a flight test of their design, the team was tasked with configuring a model remote-controlled helicopter to “get more lift for the same amount of power,” said Vincent Posbic, a graduate engineering student on the team.
Posbic said the team worked with a five pound helicopter with 10 to 11 pounds of thrust, or the amount of weight an engine can lift.
“At the end, we were getting 14 to 15 pounds of thrust. That’s a 16 percent increase for the same amount of power,” Posbic said. “We didn’t get much sleep. At the last second, we were still adding things, and I was so happy we won. “
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