Yildiz rover team are preparing for european rover challenge

Yıldız Rover is an interdisciplinary student project with the main goal of building a robotic system that can search for organic and inorganic living conditions in space. It also aims to encourage people who are interested in space and robotics to go further, creating a sociable workspace for young engineers.

In other words, Yıldız Rover Team is actually a group of students who are studying at Yıldız Technical University located in Turkey, determined to make their voice heard. The team members study in a variety of departments such as Mechanical, Electrical, Metallurgical and Chemical Engineering in addition to Chemistry, Physics, and Bioengineering.

What are they doing though, like right now?

Yıldız Rover Team is currently building their own Rover, designed by its members, with great excitement and devotion. They have been working for the last four months and will probably be working for the next eight too, nonstop, getting ready for the European Rover Challenge (ERC).

ERC is an internationally recognized annual robotics competition for students, graduates and researchers that takes place in Poland. During the competition, every team runs their own rover, attempting to reach the standards of actual ESA and NASA missions in the biggest artificial Mars field ever made on Earth.

Yıldız Rover team was refounded in 2020, starting with the obligation of working apart due to the pandemic; but never letting the situation affect their motivation or efficiency. Team members are divided into five subteams in order to make better progress within each field: mechanics, electronics, software, science and organization. The first step was to educate the recruits on their respective fields, organizing online programs on several subjects. The rest escalated pretty quick. Wheels of the rover and the gripper for the robotic arm were the first parts to get their final versions, the body designed according to the Rocker Bogie mechanism and the suspension system following right after. Software team developed a mechanism using LIDAR which locates the surroundings and repositions the rover when approaching an obstacle. Electronics designed a switch mode power supply with multiple outputs while the science team keeps going with their research on biology, geology, organic chemistry; basically every sub-discipline of science that exists.

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/yildiz-rover-team/