Lunar Rover
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May 2025 - present | Northwestern Lunabotics
Mechanical lead for 'Northwestern Lunabotics'. Designing and building a lunar rover to compete in NASA's 'Lunabotics' competition. Manage the team's Onshape assembly consisting of over 250 individual parts.
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
Excavator System
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'). We began design in Summer 2025, first designing our drivetrain and manufacturing using waterjet and manual milling. Since then, we have conducted testing of individual wheels and motors to inform further design iterations and developed a concept for our excavation system.
FEA
Von-Mises Stress Simulation of V1 wheel under reaction force due to rover weight
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
Manufactured over 50 components, ranging from manually-milling frame sections to waterjetting custom sheet metal components for our wheels.
Results
Our team has been selected for the NASA Lunabotics competition. We ranked 1st place out of 73 teams on our application's Project Management Plan as a rookie team, and have fully manufactured the chassis of our rover. Leading into competition season, we will be writing a 25-page Systems Engineering Paper, manufacturing our excavation system, and hosting many testing sessions for the rover with our team.
Manufactured Chassis
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