Cornell Mars Rover

I am on the Electrical Subteam for a project team at Cornell called Cornell Mars Rover. Each year, we build a rover that competes at the University Rover Challenge.

Our rover uses a PIC32 microcontroller, makes boards using Eagle, and writes firmware in C.

There’s no board files or anything yet on the page. This page needs to be updated soon also.

(2019 - 2020 Year)

I am taking a leave of absence Fall 2019 to intern at Astranis, but plan to return as the Electrical Subteam Lead Spring 2020 for the team!

(2018-2019 Year)

Drives Board

I am making the drives board for this year. This board communicates with all the other boards over CAN and controls the motor controllers that we buy off the shelf. These boards have been ordered but have not arrived yet.

This year, we weren’t sure if we were moving from brushed motors to brushless ones, so I made a board that could communicate with both the motor controllers we were thinking of.

We also added current sense capabilities to gauge how much current the new and old motors are drawing. Since we use Anderson PowerPoles, these current sense boards stack on top of the drives board to save space.

Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) Board

The PoE board connects our Ubiquiti radios to our on-board computer, the Jetson TX2 and provides power at the same time with an Ethernet connection.

This year, there’s additional filtering added and current sense capabilities to gauge how much current each radio draws. This might not be helpful, but something we wanted to try out this year.

Using Analog Cameras on the Arm

There’s a lot of wires near the arm on the rover. To reduce this, we want to add a small drone camera to the arm. Since the competition is in a sunny desert in Utah, the camera needed wide dynamic range.

In the end, I chose to go with Foxeer Predator Micro V2 cameras. They worked well in cloudy and sunny environments. These cameras were used with a 5.8 GHz transmitter and combined with this scanning receiver, it was a nice combo.

Radio System

Did more in field testing to see if a 900 MHz system in addition to the current 2.4 GHz one is worth it.

(2017-2018 Year)

IMU Error-Handling Firmware

Wrote firmware in C to handle errors from the IMU.

2nd Radio Comms

Tried to use different antennas with field testing to see if they were worth it.