SAVER (Surface Autonomous Vehicle for Emergency Rescue)

This document serves to introduce the design team and their competition challenge, as well as to detail the results of the project. The original design challenge was the NASA Micro-g NExT’s SAVER (Surface Autonomous Vehicle for Emergency Rescue) competition; we were tasked with developing a self-driving water vehicle capable of delivering supplies to Orion astronauts separated from the rest of their crew in the case of a maritime emergency. However, we were not selected to go forward in this competition and thus we decided to scale down the size of the SAVER device to shift the focus of the project to testing and refining the technologies necessary for a successful future team. Additionally, our overall Cal Poly SAVER design team was split into two subsystems: one focused on the hull and payload of SAVER and the other focused on the navigation, controls, and mechatronic components. This report will detail the design process of the navigation and controls subsystem. Throughout the course of the project, we performed research on the problem at hand, outlined and refined a preliminary design through ideation and initial analysis. Following the downsizing of the project, we finalized the design, created prototype devices, and performed testing on these devices. The main body of this report details our design processes, as well as the manufacturing, testing, and verification of the SAVER navigation and controls prototype. Finally, a project management section describes our plans for handing off the current SAVER device and documentation to next year’s SAVER team

A comparison of processing techniques for producing prototype injection moulding inserts.

This project involves the investigation of processing techniques for producing low-cost moulding inserts used in the particulate injection moulding (PIM) process. Prototype moulds were made from both additive and subtractive processes as well as a combination of the two. The general motivation for this was to reduce the entry cost of users when considering PIM. PIM cavity inserts were first made by conventional machining from a polymer block using the pocket NC desktop mill. PIM cavity inserts were also made by fused filament deposition modelling using the Tiertime UP plus 3D printer. The injection moulding trials manifested in surface finish and part removal defects. The feedstock was a titanium metal blend which is brittle in comparison to commodity polymers. That in combination with the mesoscale features, small cross-sections and complex geometries were considered the main problems. For both processing methods, fixes were identified and made to test the theory. These consisted of a blended approach that saw a combination of both the additive and subtractive processes being used. The parts produced from the three processing methods are investigated and their respective merits and issues are discussed