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UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
UConn Student Team Aims for the Moon with Lunar Rover Design
An interdisciplinary team of UConn undergraduates are finalists in the NASA Big Idea Challenge
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AMBER
An interdisciplinary team of UConn undergraduate students took a big-time shot at the moon last semester and it landed them right where they aimed – as finalists in the 2022 NASA BIG Idea Challenge.
They spent last fall semester developing ideas and writing a proposal. Spring and summer were spent designing and building a prototype. This fall they test the prototype’s ability to navigate extreme terrain and harsh conditions. Their work is being supported by $150,000 in project funding from NASA.
Material sciences and engineering and chemical engineering major, Theresa Nosel ’22 (ENG) is the UConn team’s leader. Nosel completed multiple past internships at the NASA Glenn Research Center in Ohio and the NASA Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.
“I was encouraged by one of my friends to apply for my first program, and it took a lot of encouragement, because you think of NASA as the most brilliant minds, and I was like, ‘That’s not something I could do,’” she says. “And then I applied for my first thing, and it just snowballed into more and more and more and more programs with them. And I just wanted to open it up to new people.”
Nosel was looking for a way to share her NASA experience with other UConn students. She learned about the Breakthrough, Innovative and Game-Changing (BIG) Idea Challenge during her first NASA internship in 2019. Now in its seventh year, the competition invites university students to solve critical needs facing space exploration. Students propose, design, develop, and demonstrate their technology over the course of a year and a half.
The 2022 BIG challenge seeks novel modalities to navigate the more challenging lunar terrains. It aligns with NASA’s Artemis program goal of using innovative technologies to explore the moon’s surface then to use what was learned for manned missions to Mars.
“Traditional wheeled rovers cannot reach many of the unexplored areas of the moon and Mars,” organizers wrote in announcing the challenge last fall. “Student teams….will develop innovative and cost-effective robots that go beyond wheeled rovers capable of exploring other worlds.”
Beginning of March, seven finalists received funds to fully develop and build out their technologies. This is the first team from UConn to compete in the BIG Idea Challenge and the first to be funded.
Fifteen undergraduate students from various backgrounds came together to form the initial team. After receiving funding, eleven additional students were recruited to help fill the knowledge gaps the team needs to be successful. The team named their design AMBER, which stands for Adaptive Morphing and Balanced Exploratory Rover.
“It was a bit of a rocky start…,” says Kalin Kochnev ’25 (ENG), a first-year computer science major. Kochnev leads the team’s product design and build efforts. The team initially worked on a soft-body robotics concept composed of balloons and motors that would move almost like a wheel. They worked on that design until the end of October, when they were finally able to have an in-person meeting on Halloween night. That meeting proved to be a critical turning point with the team recognizing critical flaws in their complicated concept.
The product design team was forced to quickly regroup and think on their feet, jumping quickly from concept to concept until they landed on the current design - a modality that morphs. The team believes this concept offer huge advantages for navigating the highly variable terrain of the moon’s south pole.
“The morphing modality involves four appendages that function as quadruped mode, which allows the modality to walk, and then in tank mode, where it has tank-like movement, and then finally in a combination mode, which allows for any combination of appendages to conform to a leg or tank,” explains Sabrina Uva 22 (CLAS), Human Development and Family Sciences. “
The design simplicity – taking a leg and adding a tread to the bottom half – is its strength.
“It’s going to operate like a tank, and it’s going to operate like legs,” Nosel says. “We’re developing this for extreme lunar terrain, but you’re not always going to have extreme terrain. Sometimes, you’re just going to be going across a flat surface, and in those instances, you don’t really need some crazy, many-degrees-offreedom contraption. You can just go across it like a tank. Tanks are energy efficient. They have excellent traction and a durable stability to them. Then, when you do go up and down these slopes, or maybe on more uneven terrain, you can change it to a leg or some combination of the two with the adaptable stability and obstacle avoidance that comes with it. So, it’s just extremely versatile.”
A simple concept, though, doesn’t always mean a simple process. The design took months of work – all while the students balanced classes and other responsibilities. Hritish Bhargava ’23 (ENG), Engineering Physics noted “The modality isn’t hard to see. But designing it is hard. We had a lot of discussion about suspension, and there’s not enough space in there, so you have to figure out some new way to put suspension in there. I hadn’t worked on something this extensive before. I’ve done other CAD work. I’ve done other projects engineering wise, too, but this was definitely a lot more painful than most projects – late nights, just doing CAD work." ”Math is a significant part of robotics,” says Vihaan Shah, ’25 (ENG), Computer Science. “The math behind a robot gets more challenging as your robot becomes complex. And I am excited to be working with the team to solve this problem.” The team continues to refine and challenge AMBER this fall semester as they prepare for the November BIG Idea Challenge Forum in California. Their proposal details a wide variety of testing terrains chosen to put AMBER through its paces. The team built a mini slope lab, similar to one at NASA’s Glenn Research Center, to challenge AMBER to climb slopes of up to 30 degrees. AMBER’s ability to handle extreme cold, ice, and extremely low pressures will be tested through alliances the team made with commercial businesses such as Caveman Cryotherapy in Farmington, Bolton Ice Palace skating rink in Bolton and National Technical Systems Laboratory in Massachusetts.
It’s an immense amount of work for the team.
“The challenge ahead is to bring this idea to life and put it through its paces in the face of several extreme lunar-simulated scenarios,” says Fiona Leek, an assistant professor-in-residence with the School of Engineering’s Materials Science and Engineering Department and one of the team’s faculty advisors. Leek says that the team’s accomplishments thus far have been completely student driven, with intentionally minimal faculty involvement. The students are incredibly passionate about this project and its outcome. “No doubt the next few months will be very challenging,” she says. “Hopefully, they will also be exciting and a great deal of fun.” The team is realistic about the amount of work ahead of them, but also excited about the potential broader applications of their technology. “Even if ultimately this project isn’t the final one chosen by NASA” says Nosel. “Someone can use this modality, and we want
AMBER (Adaptive Morphing and Balanced Exploratory Rover
to put it out as much as we can. Everything that we do becomes open source, so anyone can use it.” The team is connected with Collins Aerospace and Peer Robotics. They are interested in connecting with other companies. They also hope that their efforts will encourage other students to aim for the moon, take risks, and attempt what might seem impossible.
“I’m basically the prime example of coming from a social science background onto a NASA team and really learning how to apply my expertise and my research and learning new skills,” says Uva. “I never imagined myself in this position.”
“Don’t be afraid of putting yourself out there,” says Kochnev. “Not knowing is probably the number one thing that I got out of this project. When you don’t know things, it’s extremely terrifying, because there are so many possible ways to go about something, you don’t even know where to start. And I think that’s something that is a really valuable skill, just being able to be comfortable with not knowing and being able to find the answers.”
Nosel hopes their lunar rover adventure might inspire other students to consider how an agency like NASA could be a part of their future.
“We’re the first team to ever enter, but I don’t want us to be the last team,” she says. “I just want to really encourage other people to look into all the opportunities that are out there, and especially with NASA. Because I’ve been doing things with NASA now for four years, and they love students, and they are so incredibly supportive and collaborative with students. It’s an incredible organization to be doing projects for, and even if it’s not this one, there are so many others out there.”
Undergraduate student Robert Williams was selected for a Fulbright Fellowship in Vietnam. The Fulbright Program is a prestigious worldwide program whose purpose is to unite the people of the United States and the people of other countries through educational and cultural exchanges. “To be selected to be a Fulbright grant recipient, it is expected that you serve as a cultural liaison in addition to upholding the Fulbright mission: Respect all peoples and cultures, value diversity, and commit to international education and mutual understanding while serving as a catalyst for a peaceful and interconnected world inspired by international educational exchange,” says Williams. Williams will serve during the 2022-2023 academic year. He chose to apply for the fellowship in Vietnam for personal reasons: “As a biracial VietnameseAmerican, I applied to the Vietnamese ETA position to gather a deeper understanding of my culture and heritage, bridge cross-cultural discrepancies and similarities of Vietnamese and American culture, and provide opportunities for students, staff, and locals to grow as individuals,” he states. At Fulbright in Vietnam, Williams will interact with his local community, work collaboratively with international partners in scientific fields and participate in research. Robert Williams MSE Graduate ('22)
Based on UConn Today article written by Jaclyn Severance
UCONN NASA TEAM
Michael Aisevbonaye ‘23 (ME) Jonathan Bane ‘23 (MSE)* Hritish Bhargava ‘23 (ECE & PHYS)* Jamison Cote ’22 (DMD)* Alaa Emad El Din, grad student (ECE) Abhiram Gunti ‘24 (CS) Grayson Hall ‘23 (ME)* Ali Al Hamadani ‘24 (CSE) Rany Kamel ‘25 (CSE)* Kevin Knowles ‘23 (ECE)* Christina Lawrence ‘23 (CHEG & MCB)* Theresa Nosel ’22 (CHEG & MSE)* Arav Parikh ‘25 (CSE)* Blake Pember '23 (ECE) Sana Qureshi ’22 (MATH & MSE)* Emily Rondeau ‘23 (MSE)* Alaa Selim '26 (ECE) Vihaan Shah ‘25 (CS)* Matt Silverman ‘24 (ECE) Elliott Trester ‘23 (MSE)* Sabrina Uva ‘22 (HDFS)* Anna Vladimirskaya ‘25 (CSE)
* initial team members
Undergraduate Student’s Internship Success at IBM
Paranjape’s success at her three IBM summer internships
Each academic year, college students frantically search for summer internships. It’s a tricky and stressful endeavor. But UConn’s MSE undergraduate student, Ria Paranjape has had not one, not two, but three summer internships at the global technology company, IBM.
Paranjape is a senior studying materials science and engineering after switching from chemical engineering her freshman year. “After arriving at UConn, I learned more about the materials science program through some introductory classes and found that it aligned more closely with what I was interested in pursuing,” she says. “Additionally, I knew MSE was an ‘up and coming’ field, which furthered my interest in the major.”
In the field of materials science, Paranjape is most interested in polymers research with a focus in sustainability, and product design and development in materials selection.
Undergraduate Laboratory Director Fiona Leek has provided Paranjape with a positive and enriching experience. “As a professor, she makes a huge effort to show support to her students and help every step of the way,” says Paranjape. “She is incredibly passionate about what she does, and it influences myself and my peers to work harder in our major and post-graduation when we’re in industry.”
When Paranjape was first searching for an internship, she wasn’t entirely sure on what she wanted to do. But she picked IBM because they are heavily involved in technology, and materials science is a very important part of that. “My first internship involved studying corrosion resistance, and from there my research narrowed down to what I worked on this previous summer, which was superconductor electroplating for quantum computing applications,” she states.
During her first summer at IBM, Paranjape mainly worked in the lab and ran tests on various samples with her manager. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, her two following summers were online. Since she could not physically be in the lab, she focused on experiment planning, design of experiments and data analysis. Ria Paranjape, MSE Graduate ('22)
But the pandemic did not stop Paranjape from enjoying her time at IBM. “I constantly was challenged and had to think about things in ways that I hadn’t before, which helped me develop my critical thinking skills in a very welcoming environment,” she says. “Everyone I would talk to would be so open to helping me or talking to me about their area of expertise, giving advice, etc. It goes back to how I really appreciated being valued as an intern.”
Paranjape has three pieces of advice for MSE students to succeed as an intern: keep an open mind, always ask questions and be confident! “Sometimes you might land a role that isn’t exactly what you expected yourself to be doing, but the beauty of materials science is that it can be applied to almost anything,” she states. “I tend to get imposter syndrome when I’ve achieved something because I think I don’t deserve it, or I’m not smart enough to be at this place, however, being confident in yourself will help alleviate that.”
And as for future students, Paranjape recommends studying materials science. “Right now, especially, the field is expanding rapidly and offers so many exciting opportunities right out of undergrad. UConn MSE, specifically, prepares you for a career in industry by offering a wide range of materials classes you can take,” she says. “The professors make sure to drill important concepts and give you valuable information you can use past graduation. With the new MSE building underway, the growth that the department will have in the near future is incredibly exciting and even more reason to consider the program!”
