Senior Design - LANDER
PROJECT SCOPE DESCRIPTION
The Moon is an essential first step to interplanetary colonization. Transporting heavy mining equipment to the surface of the Moon and moving substantial amounts of materials around the surface of the Moon will be essential to a functional Moon Colony. As a solution to this problem, LANDER proposes a design that could help create a vehicle to transport equipment from lunar orbit to lunar surface.
LANDER provided a small-scale demonstration of the landing vehicle’s controlled propulsive landing abilities on Earth. The project could potentially be used as a foundation to complete
a controlled descent flight test in the future with a payload. The objective of project LANDER was to demonstrate the system’s ability to complete a controlled propulsive landing. This demonstration was conducted on a Test Stand, where the vehicle was stationary for the entire operation. During operation, simulated flight data was used as an input to the system.
IN-DEPTH SYSTEM DESCRIPTION
The entire system was comprised of a vehicle structure and test stand. The structure of the vehicle resembles a small rocket with fixed landing gear. The vehicle structure housed avionics and control mechanisms while the test stand held the vehicle in place during operation. During operation, the test stand collected thrust data from the vehicle. This data was then sent to the avionics system where it was be processed by the control software. The control software then generated commands required to adjust the attitude and vertical velocity. These commands were then be sent to the control mechanisms for execution. The test stand provided physical support to keep the vehicle stationary during operation. The load cells used to process data were connected to the system physically via the test stand. During operation, the vehicle was be mounted such that the nose cone faces the ground, and the motors thrust upwards toward the sky due to a campus safety requirement.
System Description
Concept of Operations
My contributions to the project pertained to designing the control software that was run on the vehicle's microcontroller. Prototyping was performed in MATLAB's Simulink and the final iteration of the software was written in C++. The control software simulated the vehicle dynamics and proceeded to pass the attitude error to a PID controller to correct the vehicle's orientation. The pass fail criteria for the control software was largely related to the final velocity and orientation of the vehicle. LANDER worked to achieve a final velocity below 0.5 m/s and a final pitch and yaw under 5 degrees. The final results from the control software can be seen below.
Control Software Results
PROJECT CHALLENGES
While there were plenty of technical challenges with this project, the most difficult problems to solve were related to the project's timeline and the scope of the project. After working on this project for a semester thinking we were going to perform a flight test, the scope of the project changed to only demonstrating the validity of our system on a test stand. This allowed the team to relax constraints on weight, and size, but this also created an influx of work in the form of both engineering and documentation that all had to be completed over the span of a few weeks. The team learned to reorganize and alter processes to effectively deliver a successful product in the end.