Trinity Intelligent Ground Exploration Rover

Details

TIGER has been the goal of several different senior design projects now. In Fall 2025, Dr. Nickels is going to "tear it down to the studs" and rebuild, with the goal of having a serviceable platform for further work. It should have six drive wheels, a passive rocker-bogie suspension, and at a minimum an interface to ROS2.

Project Logs

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Summer 2026 - New Legs Ready
knickels • 2 hours ago • 0 comments

Over the summer, Ryan in the MakerSpace has been working on re-building the legs to be stiffer to torsion, which seems to be the primary failure mode of these legs - the lever of the wheel twisting against the body. We decided to use bicycle head-sets for the joints, which consist essentially of two sets of bearings and races, separated by some distance. You can see them in the image below.

The legs are made from 1x2 aluminum bar stock, and the head tubes/steer tubes from 34mm (ID) and 1 1/8" (28.5mm) ID aluminum pipes. Shoutout to Clayton, a Trinity student, for his excellent aluminum welding skills.

Now that the mechanics are set, it's time to re-work the electronics, using what we've learned from the TRIPPY and TIGER-OSR builds in Summer '25. For now, I'm re-using the custom 2-layer RCB (Routed Circuit Board) from the old TIGER rover, as shown below.

PCBWay reached out to me about sponsoring a new spin of the TIGER control board, and I just finished designing that one, so I'm excited to see how that works out - I haven't had a board made in a few years, since we've been routing our own, but they've gotten cheap enough that it's sometimes better to let the professionals handle it :)
Fall 2025
knickels • 09/09/2025 at 22:19 • 0 comments

Dr. Nickels will be updating the rover in Fall 2025, after he spends some time building a couple open-sourced rover designs - first, TRIPPY - a sawppy varient, then JPLs Open Source Rover, to have a couple smaller hopefully robust platforms and to learn construction and programming techniques from them. Stay tuned!
Summer 2023
knickels • 09/09/2025 at 22:15 • 0 comments

The main focus this summer was on upgrading the electronics from a breakout to an RCB (routed circuit board).
Senior Design 2022-23
knickels • 09/09/2025 at 22:10 • 0 comments
Senior Design 2022-23
- 80/20 Aluminum Chassis
- Single-Cycloid Gearboxes (13:1)
  - 3D printed, aluminum, steel
  - belt driven
  - BLDC Motors w/ESP32 drivers
- Steerable Legs
  - Stepper Motors w/Gearboxes
  - ESP32 drivers
- Rocker-Bogie Passive Suspension
- Joystick-Control
Summer Research 2022
knickels • 09/09/2025 at 22:07 • 0 comments
Summer Research 2022
- Single-Cycloid Gearboxes (13:1)
- 80/20 Aluminum Chassis/ 4x Fixed Legs
- Arduino remote-control
Senior Design 2021-22
knickels • 09/09/2025 at 22:05 • 0 comments
Senior Design 2021-22
- Composite Cycloid Gearboxes (13:1)
  - 3D printed, aluminum, steel
  - Encoders to monitor wheel rotation
- 80/20 Aluminum Chassis/ Fixed Legs
- NVidia Jetson Nano controller, ROS
- ESP motor controllers
- URDF robot model with Skid Steer controls
- More robust motor drivers
- Zed2 AI-Based 3D Camera
- Navigate around obstacles
- Outcomes
  - failed drive motors (x4)
Summer 2021
knickels • 09/09/2025 at 22:03 • 0 comments
Summer Research Team 2021
- Composite Cycloid Gearboxes (13:1) - 3D printed, aluminum, steel.
- 80/20 Aluminum Chassis/ Fixed Legs
Senior Design 2020-21
knickels • 09/09/2025 at 22:00 • 0 comments
Senior Design 2020-2021
- 3D printed gearbox (1 complete)
- Very robust chassis/legs (steel)
- Very heavy chassis/legs (steel)
- Arduino-based motor driver circuit