Odysseus

Team Odysseus • Advanced ORT Team

Who Are We?

We’re Team Odysseus, 10 University of Bristol students, who made the university’s debut in the advanced stream of the UKSEDS Olympus Rover Trials. Our team built our Mars rover for testing at Airbus in July 2024. Check out the gallery of snapshots and details below to see what we made and how competition day went.

Team photo of Odysseus rover team, standing on sand at Mars yard at Airbus, holding mini rover
At competition day, holding our rover

Follow us!

We’ve shared our progress on the rover on our Instagram page.

Follow us on Instagram to see what we’re building, meet the team and competition updates.

View Our Instagram Page

What Are We Making?

Latest Renders of Our Full Rover

A render of the rover on a dried lake bed
Side Render
Top Render
Top Render
Back Render
Back Render

Explore our Subsystems

Click through →

Mechanical Subsystem

Drill Arm

Our drill arm, designed to manoeuvre to extend to hard to reach places, will be drilling for samples in the Mars cave
Mechanical Subsystem

Solar Array

Our petal design rotates the shelves to be evenly spaced while taking up minimal volume when stacked
Structural Subsystem

Suspension

Our wishbone arm suspension allows the rover to travel over large rocks without getting stuck, with the wheels free to rotate up and down
Structural Subsystem

Wheel

Our wheel designs is made to grip and push back the fine Martian sand without slipping
Software Subsystem

Controller

Our advanced machine vision and path planning runs locally on the onboard Raspberry Pi
Structural Subsystem

Chassis

Our chassis is made of aluminium extrusions designed to be extremely lightweight and strong
Software Subsystem

Camera

Our Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 allows the rover to understand its surroundings in HD
Electrical Subsystem

Motor Control

Our L298N motor driver powers our four wheels over the rough Martian terrain
Explore our Subsystems and How They Look

Render from Our Subsystems

Our Poster

Check out our poster from the National Students Space Conference 2024

Our Team's Poster

Outreach

We presented our rover design at the National Student Space Conference, held at Bristol on the 3rd of March 2024
Some team members standing in front of poster
Some of our team who were presenting to attendees at the two-day conference attracting hundreds of students alongside large aerospace and exploration companies
Our Instagram Page
Our Instagram page has over 150 followers and provides regular updates on the build and testing process, shows the team members and other interesting space news.
Instagram header for team_odysseus

Follow our Instagram for more info!
@odysseus_team

Instagram

Competition Day

See all the photos from the day below

The competition was held on the 20th of June 2024 at Airbus in Stevenage, where they construct satellites and test rovers. Our team was one of 7 teams competing on the day in the advanced stream.

We began by having the test on the Mars sand. Unfortunately, one of the wires powering our left wheels had become loose, meaning the left wheels locked up and the right wheels spun like normal. This means we could not drive, only spin, so we weren’t able to enter the simulated cave. We did get the chance to test our data collections and subsystems.

We tested the arm and the solar deployer, both of which worked and performed as expected. Without the ability to drive on the sand, sadly we could not win the innovation or best rover prize.

We had success in the vibrations test, with no damage to the rover in the simulated Falcon 9 rocket launch. Our rover body withstood up to 10Gs acceleration and came out with only a loose bolt or two.

A picture of our rover being assembled, on a desk, with the BristolSEDS logo visible on the back
Last minute assembly. Branding and University of Bristol colours were very important.
Our solar panel deployment system sits ready for action on top of the rover
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