Posted with permission:

Hello all, I just wanted to let you know of something that may be relevant to your science fiction outer-space related interests.

In addition to casting FI, I spend my time pursuing a degree in chemical engineering at the University of New Hampshire. This year, I am on a team at my university that designs robots for a NASA competition. The nature of the competition is which team can create the best remote control (or autonomous) robot for mining on Mars or near-Earth asteroids. The challenges of making a robot that can operate in low-pressure, low-gravity, low-temperature conditions is interesting. Each year, teams from schools all over the United States go to Cape Canaveral for the competition. They bring their robots, and they are judged in categories like autonomy, bandwidth size, amount of simulant ore mined, and successful navigating obstacles. (Yes, there is a robot obstacle course in Florida).

The UNH team placed in third last year, and received first place in minimizing bandwidth category and second in mining. This year we are going to try to take first; it is a point of pride for us since we are one of the smaller schools participating in the competition. We are also the ONLY team from a New England school.

I mostly do wiring, circuit design, and some other controls stuff (programming assistance etc.). Most of the rest of the team is mechanical engineering students. Normally, only seniors get to go to the Florida competition (great incentive to keep working on the team). This year, despite being a junior (and the odd major) I was invited to come down to the competition by the team captain and faculty advisor. We did the math and all of us have to raise at least $800 to get our robot and team members down to Florida.

So if you happen to work for a company looking for a (tax-deductible) cause to donate to, please consider giving the sponsorship information (liked below) to the appropriate department. It’s so we can have more robots in space.

Thanks guys, see you at the one-day!

Daniel


Robot video!
www.youtube.com (UNH featured at 13:52)

Sponsorship package
tinyurl.com

Who knows, I'm sure my company has spent money on weirder things. I just forwarded the info to our new VP of Marketing and the CEO. We'll see what they say.

I have passed along to a friend who works at Boston Dynamics (now Google).

Do you guys use any CNC machines to make robot parts? We sell CNC Endmills, so if you do I can see a connection for us.

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Leader of Vanguard Squad, Archipelago Liberation Forces

Wow, thanks guys!

Matt, most of our robot's large mechanical parts are cut, welded, and machined by hand. I'm not sure if we have a CNC machine for cutting metals available to our team. I am primarily on controls, so I will check with team members who are more involved with the drive train and scoop parts.

Daniel

Turns out we don't use CNC endmills for any parts. In fact, we don't use CNC anything! I confirmed that it is all hand cut and hand machined.