UMass Lowell Rover Hawks:
NASA RASC-AL Robo-Ops 2013

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Rover Presentation at NERVE Center Opening

On Tuesday, February 12, the New England Validation and Experimentation (NERVE) Center at UMass Lowell had its grand opening.  Over 250 people attended, including representatives from many local robot companies.  Eight robot companies (Adept MobileRobtoics, Aldebaran, Applied Research Associates (ARA), Caliper ID, Harvest Automation, iRobot, QinetiQ, and VGo Communications) brought robots to demonstrate the NERVE Center's courses.  Our Rover Hawks team participated in the event as well, talking about our entry in this year's RASC-AL Robo-Ops competition.


Above, Jim Dalphond is talking about our entry and robot design.  (Note that the robot shown is not actually our entry in this year's competition, but instead an earlier prototype.  Our actual entry is still under development -- but we didn't want to miss an opportunity to tell people about the competition and our participation in it.)

At the NERVE Center, we'll have the opportunity to test our rover in both sand and gravel pits:


Both are 8' x 24'.  The sand is 10" deep, and the gravel is 5" deep.  We're planning to put in some ramps under the sand as well as our spray painted rocks to test our rover.

We've extended an offer to the WPI team to test in these areas as well.

No comments:

Post a Comment