We Are Utah Student Robotics
We are a student-lead and student-organized club, whose goal is to enhance members' understanding of robotics and provide practical engineering experience. Each year we compete in the NASA Robotic Mining Competition. Our efforts throughout the year culminate into one large complex robot. The Robot's sole purpose is off-world mining. A lot of research, design, assembly is provided by the team to support that purpose. Each robot we build is unique and thought must be put into how it will move, dig, automate, be powered, be shaped, etc. The club is free to join and you may get a chance to come to Florida with select members of the team to represent our university in front of NASA scientists and heads of industry.
Bukavac
Every year the team works hard to build a robot for NASA's Lunabotics Competition (formerly called The Robotic Mining Competition). We design a robot from the ground up taking into consideration power, autonomy, mechanical loads, and lots more. At the end of the year we go to Florida to compete against 50 other universities. The club offers students an opportunity to learn new aspects of engineering and to apply what they've learned in classes.
AMEE
AMEE stands for autonomous martian environment excavator. This robot features a front loading bucket with a four-wheel skid-steer system and runs on the Nvidia Jetson TX1 computer. At the 2017 NASA Robotic Mining Competition, this robot collected the most material overall and took third place in the competition. This robot also won an innovation award with it's unique mechanism to change the center of mass. This is achieved by mounting the whole digging mechanism on a linear track and moving it forwards and backwards over the robot's frame. This is necessary because the the bucket on the front can be heavy enough to tip the robot forward when fully loaded.
SandCrawler
The Sandcrawler is called that because it resembles the jawa-piloted sandcrawlers from Tatooine in StarWars. It features a bucket ladder digging system, a conveyor belt for storage and dumping, and an Nvidia Jetson TX2 for its computer. This robot also claimed third place overall and an award for the use of a vibrator to reject dust from the collected material with the aid of many holes and slots that allow the dust to pass through.
Master Chief
Master chief is a mysterious robot that no one on the current or last team has ever seen. The web-dev for the site was never given a description to this elusive specimen. It's believed that it haunts the circuitry of the current robots: shorting circuits and messing up tolerances. Pretty spooky if you ask me.