Another busy week for the team. Conducted the drop test planned the previous week. Put together a motor integration plan to avoid blowing up any of the motors and started a pipeline for test firing the HDRMs. Across the design, best practices for damage prevention is consistently being scrutinized by the team. Meanwhile the team continues to seek students for its associated class. Learning and iterating continue to play as a strong themes across team

Gained promising results for camera-only SFM-based localization using a “video” method in COLMAP. Meanwhile the team continues to prepare tools to augment operation during the mission by completing a ML system to predict what sights might occur next. Another drop test to take place soon to look at wheel breaking, but with Valentine’s weekend coming up, testing will hold off a week.

This week the team took a look at potential current program outcomes, the elements that may cause these outcomes and laid the lines for how the team can ensure that these outcomes do not occur. Outcomes looked at were : Not being allowed on the lander and being non-functional on the Moon. The team also explored what it would take to achieve “perfect performance on the Moon.” Though, as discussed, 100% perfection would be the result of a miracle. However, there is nothing that will stop the team from trying to achieve near perfection.

The team continues to test and plan tests. Got a full-pipeline driving command test that the team hopes to conduct on Wednesday or Friday. More GSW modules passed comprehensive unit-testing, setting the total passed tests to 97 now.

Progress on ATLAS is somewhat blocked by needing EM3 testing but more progress than expected with v2 sim results. Thanks to one of Tim’s connecting the ball is rolling with the Site-to-Site VPN. Tying up loose ends on software but problems persist on flash memory erasing and comms. The third engineering model (EM3) is almost completely rebuilt, putting the team ahead of schedule for test driving!

The team continues to make progress amidst the unprecedented pandemic with care and passion. COVID outbreak schedule made. FMEA standardization complete and the team’s first procedural rock generation added in ARTEMIS!