“Our autonomous abilities greatly improved this year, given more focus on navigation, AR tag detection, and a Controller Area Network (CAN) bus driving system,” said Claire Wang, a mechanical engineering student at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, and Yonder Dynamics project manager.
In addition to a focus on autonomy, the 30-member team including students from across the Jacobs School of Engineering and majors across the whole UC San Diego campus, also designed and built a completely new drivetrain – an aluminum tig-welded chassis and rocker-bogie suspension balanced by a differential bar – using the makerspace facilities in UC San Diego’s new Design and Innovation Building.
Not all of the team’s newly implemented ideas were a success.
“We tried to implement Finite Element Analysis to optimize our rover, but after seeing one of…
