Lunar Rover
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May 2025 - present | Northwestern Lunabotics
Mechanical lead for 'Northwestern Lunabotics'. Designing and building a lunar rover from scratch to compete in NASA's 'Lunabotics' competition at Kennedy Space Center. Founded the team in early 2025 with a group of friends as part of NUSTARS, Northwestern's Space and Rocketry club.
CAD
Wheel Assembly
Excavator Bucket
Rover Frame
As Mechanical Lead, I oversee the design of custom components across 10+ subteam members, ranging from drivetrain projects that enable our rover to move to excavation projects that allow our rover to dig and deposit regolith - moon 'dirt' that can serve as a useful resource in future lunar colonies. We began design in Summer 2025, first designing our drivetrain and manufacturing our first wheel using waterjet and manual milling. Since then, we have conducted testing of our wheel and motor to inform further design iterations and started working on concepts for our excavation system.
Manufactured Wheel
FEA
Von-Mises Stress Simulation of V1 wheel under reaction force due to rover weight
So far, we have used FEA to validate our wheel designs based off hand calculations for reaction forces and torque experienced by the wheel. We plan to validate the designs in our excavation system using a similar method of hand calculations followed by FEA.
FoS Simulation of wheel hub under desired motor torque - FoS of 4.316
Von-Mises Stress Simulation of V2 wheel under reaction force due to rover weight
Manufacturing
Machined custom frame sections using horizontal bandsaw and mill, pre-drilling a 1-inch hole pattern for convenient mounting. Also used waterjet, manual mill, and sheet metal tools to manufacture our initial wheel prototype.
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