Team Angelicvm NASA LEAG 2012 Presentation

Sorry for the delay, but here is the NASA LEAG 2012 presentation that we did at NASA Goddard Space Center in Greenbelt, Meryland EEUU.

May be latter I add some subtitles..

Osorno "La Araucana" Institute - Technology Innovation Seminar

Last week, on November 15, we get invited to give a talk to the "La Araucana" Professional Institute, for the "Technology Innovation Seminar 2012" event.

It was a nice audience of computer science and related professionals of Osorno city (about 70 people).

They was very nice and the even gave us a little award for our participation...thank you guys!

Here some pictures:

UdeC Rocketry guys at UACh + BBQ!!

The guys of second year of Computing Engineer career study at UACh (Southest University of Chile), organize an event to explain to young high schools kids of local schools, the Google Lunar X PRIZE Competition and the Team Angelicvm participation on it (November 16).

For that, they as us for a couple of talks, first, one to explain how our robotic group works, installations and labs, machinery use it to build robots and so on. The second talk was about the Dandelion design. But also the guys invite to Pto. Montt to our rocketry group friends from the UdeC (University of Concepcion), to talk about rocketry in Chile and his participation in the Angelicvm Team. From UdeC it came Dario Rodriguez, Carlos Pino, Luis Feres and a friend of Dario, Ivana.

It was so nice to have our UdeC friends here with us in Pto. Montt, the event works perfectly, all the invited schools arrive and the UdeC guys even finish the day with a small rocket launch!!, very exiting, I was the luck one that press the "red button" for the launch!!, a dream come true :-)

Of course we also takes the opportunity to celebrate our reunion with several BBQs and other meals ;-)

Next some pictures of the event:

 Here is Hugo giving the first talk....

 Some of the audience...

 Dario giving his talk..

 Luis gives the second half of the UdeC talk...

 And finally Carlos..

 Lot of interest, lot of questions

 Launch preparations...

 The launch audience..

The launch!!, OMG, I press the Red Button! :-)

A couple of very nice pictures at the UACh entrance...

 A little afternoon BBQ at UACh ;-)

Ahhh and the main one later on at my place!!, a big BBQ and dinner, very nice time with our friends from UdeC, hope that the return soon!

Puerto Varas School Science Fair

At this time of the year the Chilean schools are kind of ending the academic year and a number of Science Fairs takes place....

As one of the most interest projects around, we are getting invited to a number of this fairs to gives talks and show up our progress in the Angelicvm Team project.

Yesterday (Nov 5), we was invited to give the opening talk at the Puerto Varas School Science Fair. For the talk, the High Schools students was invited, about 200 students attend to the talk.

Here are some pictures (is kind of dark to see better the projection):

Nano-Dandelion conceptual Moon rover prototype

This is a short entry on the blog to talk a little about our new Dandelion conceptual Moon rover prototype version that we call "Nano-Dandelion".

The main purpose of this version is to be as small and light as possible. The reason for this is because we are targeting a rover version of about 1kg and about 10x10x10cm form factor for the final version of the rover (Mini-Dandelion), so we need to create a rover version of about that size and with just 160gr of mass (1Kg on Earth -> 160gr on the Moon because the Moon have just 1/6 of the Earth gravity).

So, to improve the mathematics models of our simulations and since we do already test a bigger version of the rover (Dandelion Full-Size, about 3.5Kg), we decide to get "as small and light as possible".

Here is a summary of the components size and weight use it in this new "Nano-Dandelion" version of our beloved rover. Most of the components are the "world's smaller" in his particular category:

There are many "Nano" robots prototypes out there, they are always a exaggeration on the smallest of course because non of them is actually at the nano scale. So, the "Nano" terms in this robots are most about "the smallest possible" than the actual scale.

One thing that we want to do with this robot differently from other "Nano" robots is that we wanted a fully functional robot, I mean, in most of the cases, the nano robots prototypes tries to reduce so much the size or weight that the ending robot it actually can't be use it, they remove the battery and apply power with a fine wire, or use small capacitance for just a couple of second of work, or they turn the robot On and there is no way to control the thing.

In our case, the "Nano-Dandelion" is fully functional, it have his own Lipo battery for about 15min work, a Nano solar charger, an engine with differential traction control, an IMU (3 axes gyro + 3 axes accelerometer), a Rx and Tx RF for receive and send commands/data including a nano RF 320x240 color camera and video transmitter, wheels are made with Nitinol, which is a smart material that recover a previous form by heat, but that's another history....

The end result: a small robot of just 55x45x40mm and just 20gr!!, yeap that's right, just 20gr!:

We just start some testing of this variation of our rover, to test the traction in Moon like surface we use flour, here are some nice tests:

Hope you enjoy it!

Robotic Regional and Solar MicroBots Workshop

A couple of days ago (October 31) it was developed the "4th Robotic Regional" in Puerto Montt city for public High Schools students.

This is the fourth time that the R.E.A.L robotic group helps to the local Educational City Office of the city to organize, prepare and execute the event. The R.E.A.L group also performs about 10 talks and workshops along the year to the schools robotics teams and teachers, to end up with this really entertainment LEGO NXT competition.

Next a couple of pictures, but I must say that something was wrong with the camera that day and most of the pictures are kind of blurry...

We arrive very early to set up the event:

For this year finals there was 8 teams in competition, they arrive very early to the event while we was still setting up the event, we put an UACh stand that gets very busy during the event. Our beloved Dandelion rover gets a lot of attention as usual ;-)

There was a number of other schools attending to see the event, with about 200 visitors during the day...

After the inauguration of the event, the teams receive the morning challenge, which was about follow a black tape path in a specific order and the contest being!

Here are some videos of the teams testing the morning challenge:

The team gets 1 hours for programming and test before the evaluation, so in the meantime we start a long time planned "MicroBots Workshop" activity in parallel. The main idea of this MicroBot Workshop, was to introduce students about renewable energy sources in particular the solar energy as the one use it in many space robots and vehicles. This was done by a talk give it by Sebastian Blanco, member of R.E.A.L:

Immediately after the talk, we select 25 students to work assembling a little Micro Solar Robot and guess what robot we propose to build?, Micro-Dandelion of course!! :-)

Later on the afternoon, the teams receive the second challenge which was about to be able to get out from a maze:

They also get 1 hour for programming and testing, after that the judges evaluate the performance and efficiency of the solutions.

Here are some videos of the teams testing the solutions:

At the end of the day, the judges give the verdict and the WINNER OF THIS YEAR ARE:

1.- Liceo Industrial Alerce

2.- Liceo Darío Salas

3.- Liceo Colonos de Alerce 

1° Place - Liceo Industrial Alerce

A big, big congratulation to all the team participating, the skills of the teams are better each year and the enormousness amount of effort and passion that the boys and girls put into each robotic solution make it worth all the efforts that we made as robotic group to make this event possible!.

One more thing, the result of the MicroBot Workshop!: A Micro-Dandelion invasion!! :-)

24 new Micro-Dandelion ready to attack!! :-)