A Robot Story (1)

We are doing pretty well with the preparation of our robots. Compared to the previous years, we have the mobile base for our first robot very early. But that is no surprise.

Indeed, we use the workshop of our school where we machine ourselves the pieces. I was trained to use a milling cutter. The machines we have are quite old and have a least 40 years. Those are not numeric, but manual, and I must say it is a pretty unusual and nice feeling to manipulate them. Of course, we have a lot of safety rules to obey, in order to prevent accidents. This year, due to all the renovations throughout the campus, the workshop must move out and settle at the other end of the campus. That means moving the very heavy equipment they have and it sounds like a real nightmare of organization. Anyway, they closed the workshop in January (a few weeks earlier than what we were initally told, bad surprise ...) so we had to have most of the job done by then. Indeed, almost every piece for our principal robot is done, and we have begun to build it. But for the second robot, we don't have anything ready. We haven't made the CATIA model yet, but we will do it soon. And since we won't be able to machine the pieces, we will probably print them with a 3D printer and have an almost-all-plastic robot. For the job it will do, it doesn't pose any problem.

So, for now, our main robot looks like this :

It is lacking a lot of its parts. In fact, it has just the necessary to be able to move. We had to improvise to make everything hold together, so yes, there is a lot of tape. We are waiting for some components to arrive, in order to continue to build the robot. But with this version, I could already make a first automatic control. We use a PID controller. Here, you can see the robot turning 90° :

I didn't tuned the odometry parameters, so the robot doesn't move in a straight line when asked to, but makes a slightly curved line. It is, for example, because we entered in the code a value for the odometry wheels, which is not exact, and the two wheels may have slightly different diameters. So while both wheels think they went over the same distance, one did in fact travel a longer path, hence the curved line. This type of uncertainties cause errors that happen every time and that we can predict, so we call them systematic errors. There a few ways to correct them, and I will explain how we do it when it will be done. But for now, I am waiting so that I will not have to tune the parameters too many times, because each time the robots changes (the global mass, the mass center ...), they have to be set again. Still, don't worry, I still have a lot of things to do, including coding the functions that will allow the robot to move its actuators. 

Building robots

As I mentioned, I am part of the robotics club in my engineering school, cleverly named "Supaero Robotik Club". Our goal is to participate to the Eurobot Challenge (and win, as much as possible). There is a national selection, that takes place every year in La Ferté Bernard around the end of May. If you don't know about it, you can check their website, or let me explain it to you : each team can have two robots, of specified maximum sizes, that participate in matches. Each match opposes two teams (so between two and four robots), on a 3m*2m table, and they have to perform some specified actions. The theme and the actions change every year. This year, the theme is "Robotmovies". The robots have to move plastic cups full of polystyren balls, they have to pile wood cylinder, to close some "cinema claps", to lay some "carpets" on stairs, and to climb those stairs.

We are a team of 6 student, each with our own assignment : strategy, mechanics, electronics, actuators telemetry, and automation. I am myself responsible for the last one : I have to design and set the control system of the robots. I have access to the work already done in the club and I get help from a few previous members.

As soon as the rules were public, we made a replica of the official table in our premises.

The next steps were defining our strategy, the mechanical solution for each task. Then the "mechanic" of our team had to make Catia files for the robots (although right now, we only have one …).

The biggest of last year's robot (2014), named
"Kapit"

We have a few sponsors (Akka, Thales), who financially help us and enable us to make high-functioning robots. Fortunately, we can machine the majority of the metal pieces in the workshop of our school. Right now, we have almost finished machining all the pieces for the first (and also the biggest) robot and we hope to see it move soon.

Each year, almost 200 teams meet up in La Ferté Bernard to compete. It is a great occasion to meet people with the same interests and enthusiasm for robotics. And seeing the other robots, how ingeniously they were made, how a small group of people from a not-so-well-known university has such great ideas, is infinitely inspiring.

If you're interested, you can watch some of the matches on Youtube.

I believe in asteroid mining and I want to tell the world

Prepare to be amazed (if you're not already). This is it. The world has known a few industrial and technological revolutions, these periods of growth and wealth, with wonderful inventions and totally new stuff that man did for the first time. I was a bit disappointed to think that our generation wouldn't know such a revolution. The computer boom is over, yes there are always improvements, but no completely new stuff that blow you away. But why couldn't we have something huge, awesome, enormous, to dream about ?

Well, now we have. Asteroid mining.

This is no joke ! For now, we can't just go into space, climb on an asteroid and start digging for gold and precious metal. But I believe one day we will (well, it will not be exactly like that, but still). I do believe that humankind will be able, and will have to, develop a successful asteroid mining industry.

Don't get me wrong, I don't expect to see it myself. It will take decades and centuries to get there. But what do we really mean by "asteroid mining" ? What's an asteroid exactly ? Why should it interest us ? Why and what should we mine ? How ? Will it be possible ? (Like, really mine asteroids ? Life is not a movie !) How much will it cost, will it be financially profitable ? So many questions. And yet so few real answers : because we are in the middle of it. Or rather, in the beginning. This will be our thing, our revolution, our dream : it's a little blurred now, it seems impossible. But we're pioneers. Defining a new possible is what pioneers do.

Let's start by the beginning.

How it began

PR's first telescope, Arkyd, supposed to be launched
in August 2015

In April 2012, a company named "Planetary Resources" revealed its existence and its purpose. You can read the wiki article about it, or visit their website, but here it is : created in 2012 by Peter Diamandis, a guy pretty well known in the space field, Planetary Resources has a long-term goal to mine asteroids. In the short-term, it will develop some small (but effective) and low-cost ... stuff, such as orbital telescopes or small robots that will go explore asteroids. They have both the dream to go in space and the business aspect of it. Planetay Resources is strongly supported, by James Cameron and Google for example.

Is this all just a silly dream ? The debate has started.

Then less than a year after that, another company, Deep Space Industry, was announced. Pretty much the same goal, asteroid mining, but another vision of how to achieve it.

Lots of criticism, many reasons to think that asteroid mining will never be reality. The main reason ? Money. The second reason ? Time, or technology, which is quite the same, I guess. But these companies are real, they have real money and real goals. And maybe a few more companies will bloom in the next years.

You may have heard of NASA's "Asteroid Redirect Mission" that intends to capture an asteroid and put it in orbit around the moon to study it. Another reason why I can't wait for us to be in the 2020's.

What is asteroid mining ?

We still haven't said what exactly asteroid mining is. And that's a good question. First, an asteroid (and that's a pretty vaste name) is some sort of big rock in space. It can be composed of ice, metal, rock. They're sometimes big, like big big, but sometimes they are just about a few meters long. They are orbiting around the sun, just as we are. Some of them are pretty far and our orbits will never cross. But others sometimes come near our planet (less than 30 times the Earth-Moon orbit), and these ones, called near-Earth asteroids (NEA), are the ones we're interested in. But are there many of them ? Yes ! For example, in 2010, they were ... just 7000 to come close to us. So I think we'll be able to find a good rocking one full of beautiful metal. Or water. Yes, we'd like to extract water from asteroids. Why then, when we have plenty on Earth ? The answer if simple : money. It costs from $4.000 to $40.000 to send just one kilo of something into space. And water is even more important in space than on Earth : its many uses (from propellant to shield against the solar emissions, and, optionnally, as something vital for every living being) makes it the first thing we'd mine from asteroids.

Photograph of the comet 67P-Churyumov-Gerasimenko, taken by
the Rosetta Mission in 2014

By the way, what kind of asteroid are we looking for ? The perfect candidate :
- should comme close enough to reduce the cost of the travel (and have other properties that also reduce this cost)
- should have good quality ore
- this ore should be the easiest possible to extract
Of course, before we can send a real robot to test an asteroid, there aren't many ways to know these last two points.

Ths hows and the whys of asteroid mining

Then, how ? How on Earth (or somewhere else) can we mine an asteroid ? Sending little miners robots with huge spaceships that will come back with the ore ? Capturing an entire asteroid with a big fishing net and placing it in orbite around the moon ? Or deflect it to place it in one of the Lagrangian points ? And should the ship use some of what it would have mined as propergol for the return ? Should we transform the ore directly in space ? All is possible. We're not there now, we will have to wait some time before having to answer this problem.

Economically ? Yes, it would be worth it. For example, 2002 DY3 (what a charming name) is an asteroid that came close to Earth, less than 0.3 AU (that's 40,391,425 km, about 100 times the Earth-Moon distance ... well, ok, it's not that close ...) on 10th March 2013. It has a value of $1.43 trillion (yes, yes, trillion) and an estimate profit of (only) $78.56 billion. Just that. Even if it's overestimated, it's still quite motivating.

I literraly fell in love with the idea of asteroid mining, and that's what made me initially want to work in the space field. I believe it's our future.