ISU team competes in University Rover Challenge

The ISU team poses with their rover before the construction challenge on the first day of the competition (l.-r.): Matthew Kruse, Branden Rademacher, Matthew Nelson, Dan Harper, Kito Berg-Taylor, Jerry Stoner and Keegan Gartner.

In the sun-baked desert of southern Utah, a stand-in for the surface of Mars, ten teams of university students put the Mars rovers they designed and built through a series of tasks designed to test their rovers' agility, durability and accuracy.

One of those teams was from Iowa State University's Space Systems and Controls Lab (SSCL), a base program at ISU supported by the Iowa Space Grant Consortium.  This is the first year that the SSCL has sent a team to the University Rover Challenge, held June 5-7 at the Mars Desert Research Station near Hanksville, Utah.  The SSCL team placed fourth in the overall competition, which is sponsored by the Mars Society, a nonprofit organization dedicated to furthering the exploration and settlement of the Red Planet.

The ISU rover with the Mars Desert Research Station in the background.

"One of the students brought the competition to our attention," said Matthew Nelson, adviser to the SSCL team, chief design and operations engineer for SSCL, and a master's student in electrical engineering at ISU.  "After talking with some faculty and other students, we decided to enter."  Dr. Soon-Jo Chung, the other adviser to the team and director of the Aerospace Robotics Lab at ISU, provided some of the hardware to be used in the competition.  ISU's Department of Aerospace Engineering funded the team's trip to Utah.

Other members of the team were undergraduates Kito Berg-Taylor, Matthew Kruse and Andreas Frick, who was the team leader; master's students Dan Harper and Jerry Stoner; and Ph.D. student Branden Rademacher, all of whom are aerospace engineering majors.  (Frick is also majoring in political science.)  The sixth member of the team was Keegan Gartner, an undergraduate in mechanical engineering.

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The ISU rover takes the field.

During the intense, two-day competition, each team's rover had to perform four tasks:  a geology task, a soil characterization task, an emergency navigation task and a construction task. The teams operated their rovers remotely and were not able to view the rovers on the site or the site itself directly.

For the geology task, the teams were required to investigate multiple sites of geological interest, photographing and providing a detailed analysis of each site.  Similarly, for the soil characterization task, the teams investigated several sites of biological interest and provided a detailed analysis of each site, including measurements of local soil water concentration, pH level and subsurface temperature.

The emergency navigation task consisted of delivering an emergency supply container to a simulated distressed astronaut as quickly as possible.  The teams were provided with a last known GPS location for the astronaut, but they were told that the astronaut had strayed from this location.  The ISU team finished third in this event, coming within 12 meters of the astronaut as time expired.  Oregon State was the only team to successfully locate the distressed astronaut, and Georgia Tech placed second in this event.  The fourth event, the construction task, required the teams to use a robotic arm to secure several ½" hex bolts on a mock-up equipment panel.

"This was a really fun experience for the students and me," said Nelson.  "We learned a lot in areas of engineering and in doing a better design for next year.  Much was learned about the environment and its effect on our hardware."  SSCL hopes to enter the competition again next year.

Oregon State University captured first place in the overall competition, narrowly defeating the defending champions from the University of Nevada, Reno.  Third place went to York University of Toronto, Canada.