newsletter February 2020
MECHATRONICS AT REVOLVE NTNU Text: Marius von Hafenbrädl Photo: Marion Christine Løkkevig
What is mechatronics? The Mechatronics group is the group responsible for everything you can touch and see on the driverless vehicle. Maintenance of the existing electrical, mechanical and autonomous hardware systems on the car is carried out by this group. They also make the physical changes that are required for the car to function better as an autonomous vehicle. Their tasks involve, but are not limited to: Designing and manufacturing the necessary actuators for control and braking, designing brackets and mounting the required sensors, as well as designing and making circuit boards that run the autonomous system. What have we done this autumn? We started the fall by exchanging the front left motor from this year’s autonomous car “Atmos” with a working motor from the 2017 electrical vehicle and 2018 driverless vehicle “Eld”. After having to drive the previous season as a rear-wheel
driven vehicle, Atmos will this year be running on all four wheels. One of Atmos’ biggest problems last year was electromagnetic interference (EMI). This fall we borrowed equipment for testing EMI from Norbit and tested Atmos thoroughly. The idea is to rework parts of the wire harness and then test again to verify that we have improved. The second test will be carried out when Atmos is electronically ready for the summer. We have also designed mounts for this year’s autonomous sensors. This has been an iterative process where a design has been proposed, reviewed, and then continued to work on with the feedback in mind. A tool that really helped the process was prototyping with a 3D printer so we could check that the mounts actually fit the car.
During the fall we have also been working continuously with the design of printed circuit boards (PCBs). Close cooperation with the embedded group has made this process run quite smoothly. The mechatronics group designed and tested the first revision of seven PCBs before Christmas. Feedback from alumni and information obtained during testing laid the foundation for the second revision. What have we done so far this spring, and what remains? This year the mechanical guys have worked on a casing for the processing unit, which is a computer where we run the perception and control system algorithms. This casing has to be 100% waterproof, needs cooling for the components inside, be as light and neat as possible as well as being easy to open/close. This is not an easy task but we are confident that we will end up with a good solution.
The embedded guys have been testing their PCBs and made the second and hopefully their final revision. Now it is time to focus on the firmware. It is a lot to learn and get ahold of but the progress so far has been very promising. The electrical guys have kept working on the wire harness which is starting to get ready for testing. They have also worked on getting the accumulator ready for a new season. In the coming weeks we will implement this year’s concepts on the car and make sure that all the electrical and mechanical systems work properly. This will be a challenging time but something we really look forward to do.
THE MEMBERS
Marius von Hafenbrädl
Kavindu Ratnayake
Hemund Engmark Øyulvstad
Clemens Martin Müller
Henrik Skarre Abrahamsen
Sindre Kummervold
Martin Brøste
VISIT FROM LUND FORMULA STUDENT Text: Marius Hamre Nordrik Illustration: Jeeviga Gunathasan
This February Revolve NTNU got visitors from Lund University’s formula student team. Formula Student Lund has been building combustion race cars since 2006 and are now looking to participating in formula student electric. After Lund arrived in Trondheim at Friday, they got a quick tour of the workshop and our offices before we went to play mini golf at Trondheim camping to get to know each other better. It was a great night with both more and less impressive shots. Saturday, we had interesting discussions between the two teams and exchanged
knowledge and stories. The themes of the discussions went all the way from how individual parts were made and designed and all the way up the ladder to how the teams were organized and lead. Both teams acquired new and interesting knowledge, pushing us forward. For the night we headed to Studentersamfundet to show our Swedish friends the Norwegian student culture. All in all a nice weekend and we are looking forward to meet Lund again at competitions