Students in the College of Engineering and Computational Sciences Senior Design Program are building a lunar mining rover with technology that could support driverless vehicles.

Electrical engineering senior Megan Salinas is one of a 16-member multidisciplinary student team called Blasterbotica. She said their project “supports robotic mining technology in deep mines and Australian deserts, to self-driving cars in California.”

“The sensing and driving technology we are researching could develop into your personal driving chauffeur,” said Salinas.

Students have to apply to be a part of the team and are selected by administrators in the Senior Design Program. Two senior design teams working on locomotion and autonomy subsystems are reusing a rover built last year to make improvements for this year’s project.

“I was interested in the coding and autonomy aspects of this project,” mechanical engineering senior Ryan Stauffer said. “They wanted computer science students so it was a perfect fit for me.” 

The class is designing and building a mining rover for NASA as part of a Regolith Mining Competition. In its fifth year in the competition, Mines must develop a winning robot that will excavate and deposit a lunar regolith simulant (rock powder), traverse an obstacle area and deliver the materials to a collection container.  The winner of the competition will receive a $3,000 team scholarship and an invitation to watch a rocket launch at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in the spring.

Chris Dreyer is the faculty advisor for the team and an assistant research professor in the mechanical engineering department.

“NASA created the competition to develop technologies for and promote the concept of space resource utilization—and STEM education,” Dreyer said.

The team often does testing on the Golden volleyball sand pits, as it is a convenient substitute until a regolith test bed is ready. Dreyer said that regolith is a difficult material to drive on and can confound sensors.  

“It is an interesting robotics problem because the environment is difficult to predict,” Dreyer said. “No team has completed the competition with an autonomous rover.”

In addition to support from the program, the team raises funds through donations for most of their expenses. Angel Abbud-Madrid, director of the Center for Space Resources, also helps sponsor the team by providing funds and an assembly and testing workspace in the center’s lab on the Mines campus.

“This project directly relates to the research we are conducting at the center,” Abbud-Madrid said. “We are learning how to design autonomous systems for remote space applications. This particular project is beneficial because it brings all expertise of Mines together for this purpose.”

The Senior Design class has a website at inside.mines.edu/25763-php. The team has a website at blasterbotica.mines.edu. 

Blasterbotica is looking to expand student participation beyond the senior design groups. Students interested in helping out can contact Dreyer at cdreyer@mines.edu.

Contact:

Kathleen Morton, Communications Coordinator / 303-273-3088 / KMorton@mines.edu

Karen Gilbert, Director of Public Relations / 303-273-3541 / KGilbert@mines.edu

Imagine a smaller version of the Blaster the Burro statue on campus with the same precision of detail. Professor Jered Dean and Dr. Douglas L. Van Bossuyt, along with three mechanical engineering graduate students from the Design Innovation and Computational Engineering Laboratory under the direction of Dr. Cameron Turner, created a one-twentieth-scale model of the mascot just last week. The new Blaster stands 2.5 inches tall.

As part of a tech fee proposal that was funded last spring, a 3D scanner was purchased for students to use for research and design. One 3D printer was loaned to group to use for experiments and test its capabilities. The group is submitting a tech fee proposal next week in hopes to fund additional 3D printers for students to use at a low cost (i.e. $3-5 a printed part). They are also working on collaborating with some of the 3D print houses in Denver.

Before 3D scanners, when an engineer would want to reproduce a part without a drawing, they would need to go through a time-consuming and often inaccurate set of measurements to document the part features and reproduce the part in a CAD model.

“A 3D scanner allows engineering designers to build upon or modify existing parts with relative ease, even if they do not have the drawings to the original part,” Turner said.

The activity of scanning Blaster was done to show off how powerful the combination of 3D Scanning and 3D Printing is. The process required 4.5 hours in total and the model produced consisted of 2.5 million points of data. The group used several algorithms to correct any errors they found. A program called a “slicer” converted the data into a series of machine codes, which drive a 3D printer. Once the printing was finished, the model was wrapped in scaffolding to protect the plastic from drooping during extrusion.

“I was actually blown away by the level of detail that it achieved, and the ease with which it was used, especially with no training or prior experience,” Graduate student Daniel Anderson said.

Graduate student John Steuben is currently working on the development of a low-cost attachment for smartphones, which would convert the phone's camera into a microscope 40 times the power of the standard instrument.

“I am hoping to develop this device with STEM education in mind, and produce it for a cost of less than $5 using 3D scanning and printing technology,” Steuben said.

Contact:

Kathleen Morton, Communications Coordinator / 303-273-3088 / KMorton@mines.edu

Karen Gilbert, Director of Public Relations / 303-273-3541 / KGilbert@mines.edu

The Colorado School of Mines chapter of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) recently received the “2013 Outstanding Collegiate Section Award” at the silver level and the “2013 Collegiate Professional Development Award,” for the group’s annual “Evening with Industry” event.

The awards were presented during the SWE national conference held recently in Baltimore that was attended by more than 6,000 members from around the world.

With more than 600 members, the Colorado School of Mines student section of SWE is the largest professional organization on campus and the largest collegiate SWE section in the nation.

SWE is a not-for-profit educational and service organization that empowers women to succeed and advance in the field of engineering, and to be recognized for their life-changing contributions as engineers and leaders. Founded in 1950, SWE is the driving force that establishes engineering as a highly desirable career for women through an exciting array of training and development programs, networking opportunities, scholarships, outreach, advocacy activities and more.

Contact:

Karen Gilbert, Director of Public Relations, Colorado School of Mines / 303-273-3541 / kgilbert@mines.edu
Kathleen Morton, Communications Coordinator, Colorado School of Mines / 303-273-3088 / kmorton@mines.edu
 

A new program at Colorado School of Mines gives students an opportunity to address design challenges faced by local community partners. The Engineering by Doing (EbD) concept was inspired by the College of Engineering and Computational Sciences (CECS) as a way to include project-based learning, research as undergraduates, community and service learning and other active learning experiences.

“We believe students can develop into better engineers if they can get exposure to actual engineering and research practice during their program of study,” CECS Dean Kevin Moore said.

The goal of the program is “to provide Mines students with professional practice experiences as part of their education through ‘Projects that Matter.’” This semester, students in the EbD class are working with International Development Enterprises (iDE), a Denver-based organization that sells irrigation and water storage and sanitation to farmers in poor countries. The project aims to find a solution to help farmers in Burkina Faso and Northern Ghana maintain crops for a longer duration and sell them for a larger profit.

“This can allow their kids to go to school longer, or for them to afford more things,” said Doug Nettles, one of the students taking the class as part of the humanitarian minor. “It could really open up more opportunities for them.”

Professor Jered Dean started the semester by giving groups of students $20 to build a rough prototype of a solution. Senior Nicole Davis and her group created a drying device that used mirrors and the sun.

“I am analyzing the insulating and cooling potential of soil in Ghana,” Davis, also a humanitarian engineer minor, said. “It has been an amazing way to implement the skills I am learning in heat transfer to solve a real-world problem.”

Students regularly visit iDE’s main office at the Posner Center for International Development in Denver. Currently, Mines is the only higher education tenant at the center. Just this past week, iDE won the Global Humanitarian Engineering Award at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Global Humanitarian Technology Conference.

iDE Technology and Innovation Group Project Manager Leslie Light said the project idea has been proposed for years at the organization, but no one has fully explored it.

“The students have looked both broadly at different elements associated with crop storage and deeply in terms of the specific challenges for each,” Light said, who will be teaching EbD I "Human Centered Problem Definition" in the spring.

Nettles said working with iDE has given him the freedom to talk with experts who have knowledge or have worked in the food industry.

“We aren't looking things up in books—we are asking real people about real things, because odds are the culture and the crop details about Ghana and Burkina Faso aren't in a book.” Nettles said. “The real data is going to be in the people.”

Last semester, Mines students in the program collaborated with Colorado Aquaponics and Red Rocks Community College (RRCC) pre-engineering students to design and build an aquaponics system for the RRCC greenhouse.

Contact:

Kathleen Morton, Communications Coordinator / 303-273-3088 / KMorton@mines.edu

Karen Gilbert, Director of Public Relations / 303-273-3541 / KGilbert@mines.edu

Physics Professor Lincoln Carr and Liberal Arts and International Studies Professor Toni Lefton are connecting science and poetry in a new course this semester.

“Honors courses and programs exist in many schools, but we are not aware of a specific physics/poetry combination elsewhere,” Lefton said. “We don't think courses in most other programs would treat pseudoscience, metaphysics, lucid dreaming both in Tibetan culture and as demonstrated in the Stanford Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine, and alternate concepts of time all in one class.”

As part of the McBride Honors curriculum, students have the option of taking Carr and Lefton’s class, “Explorations in Science, Technology and Society.” The class focuses on projects such as writing poetry, papers on physics theories, stream of consciousness and interviewing panels of modern revolution survivors.

“We have intense round table dialogues, combining actual physics equations and poetry readings, political theory and philosophy, speculative fiction and future technologies,” Carr said.

Senior Katie Williams, who is majoring in chemical engineering, said the three-hour class goes by quickly.

“I think that my classmates would agree with me in saying that our discussions have not led to any definitive answers, but they have been eye-opening,” Williams said. “The class has pushed me beyond my usual thought processes and forced me to consider new ideas.”

The final project in the course will focus on a creating a “Revolution Zine,” building on the tradition of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. The zines will include essay-style articles, poetry and short stories, mathematical proofs and computer code, to name a few.

Carr and Lefton began exploring the idea when they noticed the creative talents of students while serving on the Mines Student Board of Publications.

“Both of us have lived all over the world and have seen a lot of revolutions of one kind or another, whether political, scientific, or cultural. At the same time there is this awful and unnecessary divide between the sciences and the humanities,” Carr said. “We thought that revolution seemed a natural context in which to bridge this gap.”

Check out the course blog at labtothepage.blogspot.com.

Contact:

Kathleen Morton, Communications Coordinator / 303-273-3088 / KMorton@mines.edu

Karen Gilbert, Director of Public Relations / 303-273-3541 / KGilbert@mines.edu

The Mines Society of Physics Students (SPS) will be hosting the Haunted Physics Lab Oct. 26 in Friedhoff Hall in the Green Center, 924 16^th St. Doors will open at 11:30 a.m. and the event will start at noon.

This family-friendly event will display the spirit of Halloween while SPS members demonstrate several experiments including a Frankenstein electricity bolt contraption called a Jacob's Ladder, a bed of nails and a Ping-Pong ball cannon. Younger children can enjoy hands-on experiments that will focus on physical principals such as total internal reflection, diamagnetism and laminar flow.

The Society of Physics Students is a national organization under the umbrella of the American Institute of Physics.

Contact:

Kathleen Morton, Communications Coordinator / 303-273-3088 / KMorton@mines.edu

Karen Gilbert, Director of Public Relations / 303-273-3541 / KGilbert@mines.edu

Colorado School of Mines came in first place during the PetroBowl held in New Orleans Sept. 30-Oct. 2. PetroBowl matches Society of Petroleum Engineers student chapter teams against each other in a fast-paced quiz competition. The competing teams are challenged to answer both technical and non-technical questions associated with the oil and gas industry.

The team members are pictured above (left to right): Stewart Barber, Murat Syzdykov, Doug Wilson, Erich Kerr and Darkhan Maulimgazy. View more photos on the Society of Petroleum Engineering Facebook page.

PetroBowl increased the number of insitutions competing in the event by six this year, bringing the total number of teams to 36; they included University of Oklahoma, Missouri S&T, Stanford, China University of Petroleum, Texas A&M, University of Calgary, University of Wyoming and Penn State.

The video below is from the PetroBowl/Int'l Student Paper Contest at the SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition.

Contact:

Kathleen Morton, Communications Coordinator / 303-273-3088 / KMorton@mines.edu

Karen Gilbert, Director of Public Relations / 303-273-3541 / KGilbert@mines.edu

The Student Recreation Center was overflowing with students, alumni and employers during Career Day Sept. 10, despite rainy weather most of the day.

Junior Madeline Levy said she was looking forward to meeting with Phillips 66 and Chevron.

“I think they are great employers and I like their work ethic,” Levy said.

Graduate student Katie Lehmann said that even though she is interested in some of the bigger corporations, she embraces the chance to talk to some of the smaller organizations.

 “They definitely still have a lot of resource opportunities but with a smaller structure. I think I would have a chance to be more incorporated in the organization if I worked there.” Lehmann said.

During the remainder of this week, organizations will conduct more than 1,000 interviews on campus. There are around 5,000 interviews that take place during the full academic year, according to the Career Center.

See photos from Career Day on Flickr.

Contact:

Kathleen Morton, Communications Coordinator / 303-273-3088 / KMorton@mines.edu

Karen Gilbert, Director of Public Relations / 303-273-3541 / KGilbert@mines.edu

Mines student Matthew Mischo has been selected to receive the ROTC Legion of Valor Bronze Cross Award, which is given annually for achievement of scholastic excellence in military and academic subjects.

One award is authorized for each 4,000 cadets enrolled within an Army ROTC brigade. Cadet Mischo will receive the award from the 5^th Brigade, which includes 36 colleges within Arkansas, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas and Wyoming.

Colonel James Dodson, Commander of 5^th Brigade, will present Mischo with the Bronze Cross Medal and Certificate on the Colorado School of Mines campus on Sept. 12.

Mischo was also recognized as a top overall cadet within his regiment of approximately 450 cadets at this summer’s Leader Development and Assessment Course at Joint Base Lewis McChord, Washington, and received the 11^th Regiment Distinguished Honor Graduate Standing. Mischo was recognized in a ceremony that capped off 29 days of leadership infused training designed to develop each cadet’s leadership abilities through a sequentially organized training schedule that incorporated the basic necessary skills to become an effective military leader.

Mischo, a Wisconsin native, is a senior at Mines majoring in chemical and biochemical engineering. He is currently competing for a position in the Army Medical School Program upon graduation from Mines.