Industrial Design · rfalconvargas
NASA HERC Rover — Crank Steering System
From September to December 2025 I worked on the RISD Rover Team’s steering for the NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge, co-designing and fabricating the rover’s crank-based steering system in carbon fiber. The team competed in April 2026. The work spans hand-drawn steering geometry, a SolidWorks crank assembly with exploded views, and the full composite manufacturing chain — cutting carbon, layup, and demolding — culminating in the steering module installed on the competition trike.
Read the full case study →Discipline
Industrial Design
Year
2025
Medium
Carbon-fiber mechanism
Gallery
Selected frames
Reflection
Reflection
The rover taught me to design under the brutal honesty of a competition deadline and real terrain. Steering is unforgiving — the geometry has to be right on paper before you commit expensive carbon to a mold, so I iterated the crank linkage in sketches and CAD until the kinematics felt trustworthy. Laying up the carbon and demolding the parts myself collapsed the gap between designer and fabricator in the best way.
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