Jackrabbit in the Spotlight / Tjaden Wright

Editor’s note: Jackrabbit in the Spotlight is a new feature in Engineering Connection that gives a glimpse at a successful undergraduate or graduate student in the Lohr College of Engineering.

Tjaden Wright wasn’t shooting for the moon before he signed up for his senior design project, but, figuratively, that might be where he is heading.

Wright, who is to graduate in May with a degree in electrical engineering and a minor in computer engineering, excelled in his first three years at SDSU, building a 4.0 GPA, spending a summer in the Research Experience for Undergraduates program and interning as a test engineer with Sencore in summer 2023. 

However, he had no knowledge about NASA’s Break the Ice Lunar Challenge and SDSU’s entry, Space Trajectory, which is a finalist for a $1 million prize.

Early in the fall semester, senior electrical engineering students are given a number of options for projects they can choose for their capstone effort. Though Wright didn’t know the specifics, the possibility of working on a NASA project appealed to him. Now he is one of four electrical engineering majors and nine from the mechanical engineering program on the Space Trajectory team.

Break the Ice finalists are tasked with designing, building and operating equipment that could mine and transport icy lunar soil with the aim of extracting water. The finalists will go head-to-head at a NASA facility in Huntsville, Alabama, June 3-5.

The machinery SDSU used in qualifying testing in August is being replaced by redesigned equipment. Wright is in charge of developing autonomous controls and mapping features for Space Trajectory’s excavator and dump truck rovers. 

Coding skills put to test

“This is going to be a challenging project, but a fun project,” said Wright, a 2020 graduate of Sioux Falls Roosevelt.

To date, the most challenging aspect has been mapping, or localization, as it is called in the classroom. That involves using a manually operated rover to drop ArUco tags, which are similar to QR codes, along the 300-meter course. Computer vision is then used to identify the rover spatially by locating two visible tags with the knowledge of one tag’s mapped location. 

The tag with the known location will be used to correlate the location of another tag. This process is then repeated to make a complete map of the course, Wright said.

“It requires performing a lot of sampling and omitting outliers out of the dataset to get an accurate map,” Wright said of the coding challenge.

Right now, basic operational controls, autonomy and localization are being tested on a small-scale prototype rover. Early in the spring semester, it will be tested on Space Trajectory’s existing equipment. “The localization process will remain the same when installed on the large rovers,” Wright said. 

Getting an edge on competition

While all NASA finalists are required to mine an Earthly version of regolith, the scientific term for icy lunar soil, autonomous operation is not required. In fact, during summer testing the Space Trajectory vehicles were manually driven with remote controls. However, the team felt it had the ability to add autonomous controls and that would set Space Trajectory apart from most of the other entries, Wright said.

While testing of basic controls has gone well, Wright isn’t at a point where he can just wait for other students to finish building new equipment.

“Right now, I want to add error detection in the code. For example, when a rover can’t see a tag, the idea is it will back up and move in a certain direction to attempt to locate the tags again. This way the rovers will only switch over to manual mode as a last resort. Overall, we need to evaluate different situations that the rovers can be in and see what goes wrong and how to solve these issues,” Wright said.

Eventually, the biggest challenge will be “hooking all the parts together for mechanical, electrical, and software. There is a controller board for each rover and multiple motor/actuator boards that interface with the controller board and their respective hardware. The battery provides Bluetooth monitoring that allows for its diagnostic data to be sent to the control board, where the main computer is located. 

“This data includes temperature, state of charge, and power output. For each motor there will also be temperature sensors that allow for individual monitoring in real time,” he said.

Has track record of success

Todd Letcher, the mechanical engineering associate professor and faculty adviser for the project, has been impressed with Wright’s ability to quickly create prototypes and have a functional prototype to allow experimental testing to get a quick start.

Jason Sternhagen, the electrical engineering research associate and co-faculty adviser on the project, is confident of Wright’s ability to produce a stellar final product.

He noted, “Tjaden has made extraordinary progress in a short amount of time, and I am confident a fully autonomous navigation system will be developed.”

Wright added that his summer 2022 Research Experience for Undergraduates project under Jung-Han Kimn, an associate professor in mathematics, provided him the opportunity to learn Python computer coding language, which was needed for the NASA project. 

Typing code or tapping trumpet

When Wright isn’t writing and testing code for Space Trajectory or working in one of the four other classes he is taking this semester, he might be tutoring in the Math Help Center, something he has done since January 2021.

On fall afternoons, Wright could be found playing the trumpet in The Pride of the Dakotas Marching Band. He has played the instrument as a part of the Sioux Falls Roosevelt band and continued with it at State. “A lot of my friends were doing music when I came to school. That was my way to keep up with my high school friends and still study what I wanted to, which is electrical engineering,” he said.

While being part of The Pride can be a major time commitment, Wright said, “The Pride is a fun time to hang out with my friends. It doesn’t really impede my work.”

His marching band days are now over, and in a few months Space Trajectory work will be over. In anticipation of graduation May 4, he is looking for work in the software engineering field.