ROACH2 - Robotic In Orbit Analysis of Cover Hulls

About Us

ROACH2 is one of the major missions at KSat, a student group for space projects, with an active team of about 10 students.

KSat e.V. (Small Satellite Student Society at the University of Stuttgart) situated in Germany, is a non-profit organization founded in the spring of 2014. The more than 70 members are students of all semesters, most of which are enrolled in Aerospace Engineering.

Our goal is to give members the opportunity to realize their own spaceflight projects during their time at university. Furthermore, we aim to pass on the knowledge and enthusiasm for space travel as part of our public relations work and to provide a communication platform between students, interested industry partners, research institutions and the public.

Our Project

ROACH2 is our second attempt to build a rover that can drive on surfaces in weightlessness using electroadhesion. With this experiment we want to show that this technology is suitable for the demanding environment of weightlessness and vacuum. Our experiment consists of two components that are built into a sounding rocket. The first component is our autonomous rover with electroadhesive surfaces. The second component is an obstacle course, the inside of the rocket module, which our rover will have to navigate during two minutes of weighlessness. Of course, there are also some sensors and cameras installed, so that the experiment can be better evaluated afterwards. The experiment is part of the REXUS/BEXUS programme, an international student programme in cooperation between the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the Swedish National Space Administration (SNSA). It is designed as a competition and offers students the opportunity to conduct their own ideas as technical experiments under conditions similar to those in space. The launch, on a sounding rocket up to an altitude of 100km, is currently planned for February 2021.

How PCBWay Can Help Us

At the heart of the mission are the electroadhesive pads that generate the attaching force to the surface. They work a lot like one side of a capacitor with the floor as the other side. When a high voltage is applied, a force is generated pulling these two surfaces towards each other. Without this force, our rover would no longer stick to the obstacle course and start simply start floating away. While the principle is simple, these paper-thin layers of copper and insulating dielectric pose some real design and construction challenges. Especially the very high voltages, that threaten to cause arcing, require clean geometry with no sharp edges and no manufacturing defects. When we attempted to fabricate these parts ourselves, we did not succeed to produce them with enough consistency. It is simply outside of our capabilites to make in-house.

This is why we decided to try alternative methods to produce them. This is where PCBWay plays an important role in making our project a reality.

The flex PCB PCBWay offers has the capability of making high detail circuit structures on thin insulators, exactly fulfilling our requirements. The advanced processes that professional PCB manufacturers can offer will allow us to explore new design possibilites and have the advantage of superiour reliability. PCBWay especially has excellent prices and delivery times, that support our need of fast iterations and a larger number of PCBs.