Evan is active in Boy Scouts and enjoys scuba diving, lacrosse, and soccer. He hopes to pursue a career as a mechanical engineer because, as Evan says, "I like building things."
Evan was intrigued by the Mars Rover mission after attending a presentation on it at Trinity University. Research on robot chassis designs made him wonder which kind would maneuver best in tight places. This led him to investigate body styles for omnidirectional-wheeled robots—triangular, square, and pentagonal. Evan hypothesized that a triangular robot with fixed wheels perpendicular to the vertex of each angle, or corner, would work best.
Evan built three robots, one of each design but with similar side dimensions and equal weight. He then tested them three times apiece in four mazes 9 feet long and less than 2 feet wide. The first maze was straight; the other three each had a turn in the middle of varying difficulty (30, 90, and 120 degrees). He also tested the robots using two different wheel configurations—perpendicular to the vertex angle or parallel to it. The pentagonal robot with wheels parallel to each angle vertex proved fastest, with the triangular model slowest and least maneuverable.
