News - Mission Earth
TerraROVER Manufacturing Scale-Up
A
capstone senior design team of Boston University students (Daiyu
Lian, Dheeraj Nistala, Ethan Wert, Josette Wynn) in the Mechanical
Engineering program collaborated with Prof Caleb Farny (Boston
University, GLOBE Mission EARTH), Geoffrey Bland (NASA Goddard, AREN
Project), and Lisa Ogiemwonyi (Wayne RESA, AREN Project) to improve
the TerraROVER’s manufacturing process. The goal of the project was
to reduce the manufacturing complexity and time involved with the
manufacturing and assembly processes. As it stands, the TerraROVER
takes about 13 hours to produce, and as a result, demand is much
higher than supply. Our team has reduced production time from
approximately 13 hours to under 3.5 hours. This was done by
replacing several 3D-printed parts with laser-cut parts and by
simplifying the design and streamline the assembly process. They
further simplified manufacturer assembly times by designing a kit to
be assembled by the user.
News origin: Boston University School of Education