Racing to make deadline
Get that Mars rover riding
‘Are you able to make the motors run?’
‘Why wouldn’t you hardcode it?’
‘We don’t really know what to do at all…’
‘What other stuff?’
In the ‘maker space’ on Zernike Campus, the atmosphere is charged. The air is practically buzzing, just like the 3D printers in the background.
Around a large work table, team members are having intense discussions, while at another table, students have come together to do homework for their studies. But nearby, the concentrated silence of programmers is palpable, as they focus on coding systems that will guide the machine that is yet to be assembled. Part of that is the rover’s arm, a colourful robotic limb that is being worked on by multiple people at a time.
European Rover Challenge
The metal cart, which weighs around 70 kilos, is not just any machine. This is a Mars rover called Vulcan, a remote-controlled vehicle entirely designed by students from Groningen. They have been working on it for months now and tensions are running high. Because in just a few days, they need to provide a video of a riding rover so they can qualify for the European Rover Challenge.
It definitely has an impact on your studies, but it is fulfilling
One of the big difficulties: making sure they have a movable and foldable ‘arm’ that could take soil samples from the red planet.
‘It takes a lot of dedication from everyone working full time on Makercie, and it definitely has an impact on your studies. But it is fulfilling’, says Mara-Ioana Neculau, a design student at Hanze, who has been overseeing Makercie’s PR team.
The European Rover Challenge is held annually in Krakow, Poland, and tests university students’ technical skills under the scrutiny of real space agency professionals. Teams compete in two divisions: one where they programme a pre-existing rover, and one where they build and programme a rover to perform on-site tasks based on real NASA and ESA missions.
Build and programme
Groningen’s team, Makercie, triumphed in the remote programming competition in 2023, securing first place on their first attempt. Now, for the 2024 on-site competition, they are vying for a spot among the 25 out of 69 teams that have to both build a rover and programme it.
‘That’s already some steep competition we have to overcome’, says Willem Klaas Buitenhuis, physics student and on-site lead of Makercie.
He joined the team when it was under ten members strong, hoping to put his theoretical physics degree to practical use. Now, the team has grown to include seventy students from various academic backgrounds, but mostly UG. All converge in the maker space on Tuesday evenings. For months now, they have been running simulations, soldering cables, designing PR content, and organising the team and its funds for the 2024 challenge.
Before June 8, the team must design and develop an entire suite of machines to perform a series of required tasks in tandem. ‘The whole mission of driving the rover, handling a maintenance panel with the robotic arm, drilling into soil to take samples, and flying the drone is similar to missions that NASA runs’, explains Bahar Haghighat, who specialises in mechatronics and multi-robot systems.
She has been supervising the team since the original student initiative sought support from the Faculty of Science and Engineering (FSE) to partake in the competition last year. ‘So there’s the rover, there’s a robotic arm, there’s a drill, and there’s also a drone.’
Hurdles
As the deadline approaches, the maker space is alive with activity. ‘What you have to understand is that everything here is made from scratch’, says Arav Bantwal, industrial engineering student and HR lead. He doesn’t just mean the rover itself. It’s also about connections to companies and even the organisation’s structure itself that needed to be established as the team grew.
This process has not been without its hurdles.
I had to learn on the job, while being team leader
The team is working with high-end equipment and software that costs thousands of euros. The initial university grants – a couple of thousand euros – barely covered the price of just the motors for the rover’s wheels.
And so the acquisitions team had to secure funds and arrange partnerships with different companies. As if that wasn’t enough, every transaction made by them had to go through tedious bureaucratic processes with the university, since Makercie isn’t an official student association. ‘But we have now initiated an official robotics student association called GEARS’, says Arav. ‘That should open more doors for institutional backing.’
Redesign
Getting specific technical equipment is never easy either, even if you can pay for it. Initially, the arm was too heavy and large, parts were in the wrong place, and the mechanics were dysfunctional. The rover’s arm had to undergo some serious redesign. ‘It’s part of solving an engineering problem: figuring out what doesn’t work’, says Haghighat.
The rover that is now driving around to be filmed for the competition has some parts that are smaller or less efficient than they really should be, for example. The main motors just couldn’t make it before the deadline.
‘See, if we had put that part here, it would’ve just snapped!’ explains applied physics student Bas Boersma, imitating a former design of the rover arm.
Fun challenge
The communication within the team, with its various backgrounds and degrees, also proved challenging when its sudden growth laid bare a lack of organisational structure.
We want to have students’ efforts recognised with ECTS
AI master student Luuk van Kelken, for instance, ‘always wanted to join a team like this’, but once he became a software lead, realised he did not actually know how to programme anything that related to the movement of the rover. ‘I had to learn on the job, while being team leader’, he says. ‘Normally, management needs to know more than the team, but I was learning as much as my teammates were. That was and is a challenge, but it’s a fun challenge.’
Mara-Ioana also embarked into unknown territory. Unexpectedly, the design student flourished in the tech-related environment. ‘Joining Makercie taught me a lot, and it really sparked my creativity.’
Better support
All the students’ learning journeys, their progress through trial and error, Haghighat has been believes, is ‘outstanding.’ Especially considering that most of them are bachelor students. ‘Even for more experienced researchers or engineers it is difficult to have a good idea of how something works before you are building it.’
Haghighat advocates for better support of challenge-based learning at the University of Groningen, therefore, as it would be highly beneficial for student development. ‘We want students to come here because they can compete in the European Rover Challenge and have their efforts recognised with ECTS, something they wouldn’t get elsewhere’, she says.
But with the deadline fast approaching, the team is focused on assembling their rover and filming the video that will determine their qualification for the on-site competition in Krakow this September. ‘It has definitely been a bumpy road’, concludes Willem Klaas. ‘But qualifying alone would already be a great achievement.’