Mobility system for extreme terrains on the Moon for NASA's challenge

Abstract

The objective of this full project is to design and develop a novel mobility system to be applied on extreme terrains of the Moon for NASA’s challenge, although in this report I will be only talking about the design part and how we came with it. First, we had to choose and focus on a type of potential mission that the rover using that mobility system would do. Once the mission was chosen, various ideas were presented regarding mobility systems and between those, we decided what type of system we would use by mixing different ideas from different proposals. It had to be something new and couldn’t be common like for example wheels. For the selection of the system, we had to research and overcome the possible difficulties we would find on the extreme terrains of the moon, like magnetic dust, big slopes or extreme temperatures between many others. After various meetings and considering different approaches, we ended up choosing a mobility system that would work with soft robotics, a robot with octopus-like tentacles where the arms could be detached to inspect more surface that would act like snakes with different modules. We decided to call this robot the UC-Ebot.