Boom Deployment Mechanism

As a research assistant for Cornell Space Structures Law, I worked on a boom deployment that could deploy an ultra-lightweight boom from a CubeSat without the boom buckling or blossoming. To do this, I designed two rollers that rotated together with high friction to pull out the boom with a constant tension. The rollers were coupled together, rotated by one stepper motor, which could be set to start and stop to bend the boom into the desired shape at the exit of the deployment mechanism. The following are images of the prototype and a demonstration of its deployment.