Project TOAD

Turn faraway wastelands into habitable paradises by planting seeds -- remotely control a robot that will cover a planet with plants and create an oxygen-rich atmosphere.

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Inspiration

In the future, we will find our way to (or possibly create...) planets with vastly different atmospheres. These environments may have high levels of carbon dioxide but very little oxygen -- perfect for plants, but not suitable for humans. In this case, growing plants is the best way to create an oxygen-rich atmosphere!

Introducing Project TOAD (Terraforming Oxygenation and Agricultural Droid), a system to plant seeds on such a planet from a safe, remote location.

What it does

TOAD is a rover that performs a three-step planting cycle and moves by remote control:

  1. Digs: Actuates a servo-driven arm to strike the dirt 3 times, creating a planting hole.
  2. Aligns: Moves the chassis forward to align the hopper with the indentation in the soil perfectly.
  3. Plants: Dispenses seeds from the 3D-printed hopper directly into the earth.
  4. Moves: Moves according to real-time joystick inputs with a low latency of 10-20 ms.

How we built it

We combined custom hardware with a distributed control system:

  • Microcontrollers: 2 ESP32s (one for remote control that processes inputs and broadcasts signals, one on the robot body that receives signals and controls the robot accordingly) communicating via ESP-NOW
  • Actuators: 4 DC motors for movement, 2 Servos for digging and dispensing
  • Controls: Joystick and Button interface
  • Software: Arduino IDE, VS Code, and GitHub for version control, C++ language
  • Fabrication: 3D printed hopper, custom gear system, mounts, chassis, and wheels
  • Electronics: Prototyping boards and lots of wires

Challenges we ran into

  • Power Management: As we did not have many batteries, we had to test sparingly and thoughtfully. This forced us to think critically about our code before every single live test.
  • Resource Constraints: We actually ran out of power (thankfully, after filming the demo!). However, we learned an important lesson that became an advantage; the inability to just "spam test" forced us to catch logic errors early by simulating them in our heads first.
  • Hardware & Software Interaction: Because our build was precise, we had to ensure our actuators and motors moved exactly as intended. A single over-extension could disturb the structure or misalign the planting mechanism.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Solving a problem of the future: We believe this idea is both creative and practically relevant for future space exploration. That combination of "cool" and "useful" is what motivated us the most.
  • Rapid Engineering: Building a large, mobile machine that can perform intricate tasks in a mere couple of days is something we're very proud of. I don't think any of us expected something so complex to come together this quickly.

What we learned

  • Sanity Checks are vital: Testing out each piece (servo, motor, wireless link) individually along the way saved us hours of debugging. We knew exactly where and when a problem occurred.
  • Descriptive Commit Messages: Documenting when and how something worked was key to our collaboration process while developing the codebase.

What's next for Project TOAD

We hope to see a future where other planets can be covered in beautiful plants like Earth. We like to look towards that day -- and prepare for it with more TOADs.

-Built by team Space Race 👍

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