Congratulations to the SFU capstone team behind the autonomous drill
Congratulations to the Simon Fraser University capstone team behind the autonomous drill project. Over the course of the capstone, the team carried an autonomous drill from concept through design and build to a working machine on real ground. The final project video is linked below.
A special thank-you to Drillware Tools, who co-sponsored the team. Support like this from working drillers is what lets a student project put a real machine on real ground.
And it is a real machine, not a classroom exercise, with torque in the hundreds of newton-metres, not milli-newton-metres:
- A 3 kW AC motor with fine control using a variable-frequency drive controller over Modbus
- A 3-DOF rod handler (lift, index, and feed) that adds and breaks rods with no hands on the rig
- A 7.5 kWh battery system rated for 200 A continuous discharge
- Power management with e-stops and autonomous pre-charge control on a custom embedded PCB, packaged to an IP65 rating
- 12 inductive sensors, 5 Hall sensors, three pressure transducers, a draw-wire encoder, and potentiometer feedback on the linear actuator, with positive feedback on every autonomous action and telemetry enough to troubleshoot the rig remotely
- A full pneumatic system, including an 80 mm cylinder putting down roughly 3,100 N of feed force at the 90 psi operating pressure
This one is close to home in more ways than one: SpaceDIRT founder Shaun Riddell was part of the team, and autonomous drilling on unforgiving terrain is exactly the problem SpaceDIRT works on every day. Watching a machine go from whiteboard to the field in a single capstone is the kind of engineering worth celebrating.
Well done, team.
Check out the project summary video here.