Do you want to lose weight?

Our rover would click this article in no time. Seriously. It really would. You don’t belive us, do you? Well what if we told you that our rover is overweight? Well it surely is for this year’s Exo-Ro competition.

So what solutions did we come up with then? And exactly how much weight should our rover lose? We discussed this and the two main ideas we came up with were the following:

1. Unscrewing unnecessary screws and nuts.

This is pretty straight forward: Remove every bolt or screw that is not essential for the stability of the rover. Our initial design favoured safety, thus we were able to find some places where some screws and some bolts could be omitted. This way we were able to save about 350 g.

2. Cutting out parts of the chassis

Yes, you read that right. We planned on cutting parts of the walls. As the rover is not supposed to go through water and the weather forecast is showing that it won’t be raining until the contest. So how did we do it? With the help of angle grinder and an adult we were able to take off almost 100 g worth of PLA plastic. It was more than we even hoped for.

How did our “diet” program go? We managed to take off 450 g. That’s definitely an improvement and I am sure the motors will feel it as well. We have the ”before” pictures, but where are the “after” ones you might wonder.You won’t see them yet, for now at least so be sure to stay tuned for the new look of the rover!