University of Washingtons Husky Robotics is top U.S. team at Rover Challenge – GeekWire

The University of Washington Husky Robotics team runs its Hindsight rover through the paces at the 2021 Virtual University Rover Challenge. (UW Photo / Andy Freeberg)

The University of Washingtons Husky Robotics team was the top-performing U.S. team and third in the world in the 2021 University Rover Challenge earlier this month.

The competition, which involved 13 teams from five countries, consisted of teams designing and building Mars rovers that could perform a variety of tasks.

Normally staged in the Utah desert to mimic a Mars environment, the challenge was remote this year due to COVID-19, and the UW team used a university recreation field to put its Hindsight rover through its paces while following instructions from judges.

Teams competed in three missions: Equipment Servicing mission, Autonomous Navigation mission and Extreme Retrieval and Delivery mission. A perfect score of 100 in that final mission including successfully navigating a 30-degree incline and 3-foot drop helped Husky Robotics to its impressive overall finish.

It was an engineering challenge to get this one-meter drop to work, Dylan Klavins, chassis lead for Husky Robotics, said in a UW News story. We figured out the kinematics of the fall shortly before competition and had our dedicated team prepare this sort of spoiler-looking roll bar out of whatever we had on hand. When we drove off the ramp we had to brace for broken electronics and an imminent rebuild of the arm, yet our solution managed to easily break the fall.

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University of Washingtons Husky Robotics is top U.S. team at Rover Challenge - GeekWire