Hey Everyone,

Here is a long update for those of you interested in the progression of the team. After a long break with minimum snow, the team is back in blacksburg with mounds of snow piling up around us. However, the snow is not stopping us from making a lot of progression with the rover.

First off, here are a few photos of the rocker-bogie prototype we have been working on. The idea behind this iteration was to have a working design to prove that the rover can move over rocks with all 6 wheels having contact with the ground. This iteration is still working out some kinks with the differential bar, but for the purpose of this iteration, we learned a lot from it, and it served it's purpose.

Currently our team is planning to meet daily in the lab to accomplish as much work on the rover as possible. Sunday night we sorted through our schedules to find the best times to meet, and last night our team had a design night to work out the final design of the arm.

Some quick updates for each sub-division:

Mechanical: Design of the arm and overall rover design are looking good. From the arm design, the forces at each angle were calculated using worst case scenario loadings.
Electrical: Pricing for the rover batteries have been completed. Servo selection based on mathematical force calculations from the mechanical sub-division analysis of the rover arm are currently taking place.
Programming: The overall rover program is very close to being done. OpenCV has been giving us a few issues, but the kinks will hopefully be banged out by the weekend. Further testing will be completed when the video cameras finally arrive.
Communications: Information about the new H.265 protocol is being researched. With this new protocol, the transfer rate should be cut in half from the current H.264 protocol.

As a final little update, the team has come up with an awesome name for both the team and the rover.
The team name is:

PYREX: PolYtech Rover Exploration

The rover name is:

Animus

Now back to do some more work. If you haven't already done so, please like our facebook page. There is a button to the right which will like our page and link you over to the page.