Every year, NASA hosts a competition down at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The main goal of the competition is to find the most optimal robot designs for mining dirt and gravel on the surface of Mars. About fifty teams from all different universities across the United States compete. While the competition has been going on for many years now, Wright State has only taken part in it for the last four years. The project is a Mechanical Engineering Senior Design Project and normally has four Mechanical Engineers on the project. Last year (Fall 2015 as a Sophmore) and this year (Fall 2016 as a Junior), I was brought on as a Computer Science student to help lead the programming of the robot. The motors of the robot are connected to four motor controllers which connect to an Arduino. The Arduino connects to a Raspberry Pi which sends and receives commands via wifi to control the robot. On the other end is a computer that is running a Python program and has two Xbox 360 controllers as input (one to control the wheels and one to control the buckets / conveyor systems). One of the Mechanical engineers from last year (2016) and I engineered all of the code together (though a tad poorly but it works!). The Wright State newspaper did an article for the 2017 competition you can view here.
The 2016 WSU NASA Robotics Team at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida.