Outcome

Speculative Proposal / Conceptual Design

The big idea of our proposal is to build the interior structure of an independent mobile biome for plants with self-leveling and adjusting system and artificial light system. We want to take a step forward, to create an experimental ecosystem and mobile lab that can achieve self-maintenance for 18 months as well as to provide sufficient data for researches of plants living conditions on Mars and exploration of Mars surface.

Prototype

What we built was a global structure with gear DC motor that could control the tilting degree of plant platform. For the global structure, we used Solidworks for specific design, laser cutter to prototype then put all the parts together with hot glue gun. For the motor part we used Arduino nano to control the gearhead DC motor which should be attached to our plant platform to achieve the self-leveling feature. As for the artificial lighting system, we had an LED strip around the interior of the structure. Two springs are built into the connection joint between the plant platform and the globe structure, served as shock absorbers.

Precedents

Gyroscope: an apparatus consisting of a rotating wheel so mounted that its axis can turn freely in certain or all directions, and capable of maintaining the same absolute direction in space in spite of movements of the mountings and surrounding parts.

Sphero: the first robotic ball gaming device that you control with a tilt, touch, or swing from your smartphone or tablet. It connects via Bluetooth wireless technology with your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, or Android device* for over 50' of wireless control.

Process

First we tried to extend the idea of Tumbler from one of the architecture teams, assuming that we have a inflatable exterior to work with and trying to imagine what it should look like for a system that is responsive and self-contained. In the first iteration of our prototyping process, we made a much smaller and rectangle-shaped plant platform, because we want to simplify the variables of the plants that we need to keep alive, and later we decide to make the platform as big as the inner space since it is better to have more samples to work with in terms of experiment and research, given that the resources needed for a bigger area of platform is not significantly much more than a smaller one.

Reflection

In the process we learned how to approach big ideas with many possibilities and restraints, trying to think out of the box and come up with better solutions along the way. Also we developed our own understanding of what a responsive mobile environment could possibly be in extreme conditions like Mars, and how we can address the problems and challenges by breaking up one big problem into many smaller ones and solve them one by one.

Open Questions and Challenges

• How do we effectively absorb shock?

• how long can it self-maintain in unstable environments? Is the system robust enough to deal with a mission as long as 18 months?

• Completing self-leveling mechanism and making it battery powered

  
  

Attribution

Sphero: http://www.sphero.com

PLANTOID: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-agenda/en/news/plantoid-robotic-solutions-inspired-plants

FarmBot: http://waldenlabs.com/open-source-robot-tending-your-backyard-garden/