ASTRA

Team Lead - Ezekiel Kuntz

ASTRA is SHC's project centered around the University Rover Competition (URC). For this competition we construct a rover that is designed to complete various tasks from analyzing soil samples for extinct or extant life or possibilities for life, autonomously navigating the desert, delivering items of various sizes and weights to destinations, and servicing equipment (such as pushing buttons, manipulating a screwdriver, and opening and closing panels). All of these operations are monitored by the Base Station, a centralized command center that is intended to operate similarly to how the actual rovers on Mars are controlled. The competition will occur from the end of May through the first week of June, and will be held in Hanksville, Utah.

CAD model of our composite wheel design



Interested? 

CONTACT INFO

Team Lead:

Ezekiel Kuntz

Email: edk0004@uah.edu 

Phone: (720) 320 - 7198

Chief Engineer:

Tristan Carter

Email: thc0005@uah.edu

Phone: (205) 861 - 5793


SPONSORED BY



Freshly machined and assembled gearbox housing

The ASTRA team is currently hard at work integrating all subsystems of the rover design. We are preparing for our System Acceptance Review that is due by the beginning of March. This video and document will be the determining factor for attendance to this year's competition. 

Members are machining components in CNC mills and lathes, welding, 3D printing complex assemblies, working with composite manufacturing and designing and testing software that will enable us to be able to navigate the sands of Utah autonomously, as well as complete the various tasks assigned to us by the competition.

Early render by our mechanical team