Mars Rover Mechanical Arm & Turret

The Rover Mechanical Arm and Turret (RAT) team was originally tasked with designing and building a mechanical arm to attach to the Exo Mars rover: a project headed by Cal Poly professor, Rich Murray. The rover will be the 3rd in a series of rovers sponsored by Murray. Through ideation, comparison studies, research, and prototyping, the RAT team determined a design capable of fulfilling the sponsor’s specifications. The concept design is lightweight, durable, and capable of 4 degrees of freedom. With two links and a mechanical claw, the rover arm has the capability to retrieve small rock samples from Mars's surface. The links of the arm pitch with respect to the rover in order to position the claw at the desired location, then the claw can be rotated, opened, and closed to collect the samples. The arms are offset from one another such that the arm can collapse onto the body of the rover within the designated space to minimize possible interference with other subsystems and to keep the rover better balanced when the arm is not in use. Additionally, the arm software framework is designed to be compatible with the main rover software without extensive modification of the existing rover codebase. This framework is run as a local server mostly isolated from the Rover runtime. The final prototype can maneuver the claw end effector in a 2D plane and gather small rocks under 50 grams, depositing them anywhere within the range of the system.