Appropedia:FRED

Project: FRED is Front Range Community College's contribution and competition entry to the Colorado Space Grant Consortium Robotics Challenge in 2025.

The team developed the robot to fit all of the competition guidelines and autonomously navigate across all of the challenge courses at the robotics challenge.

The final robot serves also as a capable research platform.

Project: FRED initially was going to more of a sensor-oriented robotics platform and was designed with basic though functional pathfinding and navigation.

Project: FRED took shape about half way through the program. At this point the whole team had built some connection to each other and learned the basics of CAD, soldering, programming, etc. The team decided that with the advent of high powered edge computing such as the Raspberry Pi 5, running a machine learning algorithm to navigate the COSGC Robotics Competition courses was a viable and novel option.

To improve the rats nest of jumper cables, the team landed on designing a custom Printed Circuit Board (PCB) for the robot and organizing a wiring harness with Japan Solderless Terminal (JST) connectors.

A larger robot platform meant more weight, and more weight necessitated more torque in the wheels. The team needed to decide between exhausting further budget and buying more capable motors, which would also weigh more, and designing more capable wheels using the motors they had, which introduced mechanical failurepoints and complexity but saved money and had the potential to outperform new motors.

Ultimately the new wheel design (Figure1) performed well and the robot was able to navigate successfully in the sand at the Great Sand Dunes National Park on compeition day.

GitHub Repository

Thingiverse maybe? Link to Zoey's work on onshape? Jasper's Fusion page? Files for Keven's PCB?

Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms for Autonomous Rover Navigation Efficiency on a Resource-Constrained Platform

• Link to Research Paper

Authored By Jasper Bayless, Madeline Kovanda, Keven Martinez, Zoey Woodworth

Photos photos photos!