Project Title: PHALANX: Developing Novel Sensing Techniques for Planetary Robots
BASIS Advisor: Mr. Kaufman
Internship Location: NASA Ames
Onsite Mentor: Dr. Michael Dille
The goal of the PHALANX project is to develop new sensing techniques for mobility-limited planetary exploration robots, such as the Mars Rover. As the general direction for space exploration has shifted towards finding life, we need ways to explore caves, lava-tubes, and other inaccessible regions. Due to the cost of launching new rovers, they are driven extremely conservatively and not allowed to venture into places which may damage them. To solve this problem, a team at NASA is working on building sensing projectiles which can be launched off the rover at little to no risk to the rover. The projectiles should be able to measure various environmental factors and also gain an understanding of their position relative to each other so that the data can be visualized on a map. Since the project is currently a proof-of-concept project, my role is to refine the existing design to make it more robust and add new sensors if time permits.
My Posts
Week 12: Finishing up (not really)
May 12, 2019
This week I mainly worked on finishing up the board design plus some firmware for the new microprocessors. My mentored put in an order for my designs from a PCB fab house, so we should get them in a few weeks. At that point, I’ll test them and confirm whether or not to get some […]
Week 11: More Board Design
May 04, 2019
This week I mainly worked on designing more boards. The node mainboard is just about finished, with the final dimensions being 1.2 x 2.1 inches. It is significantly smaller than the last one (about 30% of the area) but has a bunch of improvements. In addition to the main board, I’m currently working on a […]
Week 10: Board Design
Apr 29, 2019
This week, I mainly focused on redesigning the current boards to make them smaller and also designing new boards for a methane sensor and a particulate sensor. I can’t post any CAD renderings here, but they are quite small compared to my earlier boards. The process involves frist creating a schematic, then a footprint for […]
Week 9: Presentation + Board Rev B
Apr 22, 2019
In addition to my senior project presentation, I have to give an exit presentation at NASA detailing what I’ve been doing. I spent some time working on that–though I still don’t have a lot of plots so there are some repetitive slides. After that, I started with the new board. The goal of the board […]
Week 8: Post Test Forensics
Apr 15, 2019
I started this week off by running some test programs on all the nodes to try to figure out where the failure point was for each one. I didn’t make much progress, though, because everything worked fine. So I’m not sure why 3 of the nodes failed during the test… The next step is to […]
Week 7: It worked! (Sort of…)
Apr 08, 2019
The test last week worked–mostly. The ranging portion of the test, both static and movement, went well but the sensor data part no so much. Overall between 8 different nodes, we had roughly 4,700 ranges, which means at least 200 per pair. 200 is a good enough number to average to produce reliable measurements. For […]
Week 6: More Bad Weather and Testing
Apr 01, 2019
I’m glad that we’re getting rain because we need it… but why now? It’s the worst possible week for it to rain. My prototype isn’t waterproof so if it gets too wet, it will quite literally blow up. Monday – Thursday mainly involved getting the last 3 projectiles assembled and programmed. No surprises there, although […]
Week 5: Vacation and Bad Weather
Mar 25, 2019
This week, I went on vacation, so nothing much really happened on my project. My mentor was supposed to test my prototype outside for the full 48 hour period, but the on and off rain stopped that from happening. Plus he wasn’t able to assemble everything in time because he had few emergencies for his […]
Week 4: Assembling More Projectiles
Mar 18, 2019
This week, I finally managed to print and assemble 9 projectiles. Each projectile takes around 10 hours to print, and 30 minutes to assemble. While waiting for the printers to print, I continued working on the code for each the nodes and ironed out details about how everything should work for the test next week. […]
Week 3: Assembling the First Projectiles
Mar 11, 2019
This week I started assembling the first of the projectiles. 3D printing things takes a very long time. Too long. The body of the projectile takes ~8 hours while the head takes ~3 hours, taking 11 hours just to 3D print it. On top of that, I have to cut the spikes which get mounted […]
Week 2: Debugging and Preparing for the Future
Feb 25, 2019
Last week was fairly uneventful. It mainly involved coding, testing, more coding, and more testing. The projectiles had a couple of bugs when it came to the mesh networking between them, so I spent some time fixing them. Although this inevitably created new bugs which I will fix in the future, they work better than […]
Week 1: An Introduction to PHALANX
Feb 20, 2019
Hey everyone! My senior project is called “PHALANX: Developing Novel Sensing Techniques for Planetary Rovers.” PHALANX is a project at NASA which I worked on over the summer and am continuing to work on for my senior project. In this post, I’ll mainly focus on some background. I looked for an internship at NASA because […]