Mars rover project

This summer I worked at a project for RUAG Space in Sweden where we constructed a robot arm from scratch more or less. First we were in a recruitment competition for a week where we proposed a draft solution and won. We were all master students from Chalmers University of Gothenburg. Then RUAG decided they wanted the arm, and launched it as a summer job. We built it from scratch in around 16 workdays. Everything from hardware design, to software development to laser-cutting of metal parts and all in between those was done.

We got to show it at a major event in Sweden called Almedalsveckan where our foreign minister Margot Wallström and first Swedish astronaut Christer Fuglesang took a good look at it. Here is a video describing it all:

I took care of modeling, simulation, some of the electronics construction and most of the low-level programming in this project. Previous experience came in handy and I think we managed to avoid many time consuming traps.

Funny thing, it's one of the projects presented on this this blog that I have put least time on but the first project where I've gotten paid. I think I personally spent more hours on the heating system presented in this blog, than this robot arm project. So seems that I can get paid for doing my hobby :)

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