Picorover with Spikes!

The plain Picorover with blank surface is quite good at climbing moderate slopes. Nonetheless, people suggested that the climbing capabilities could be improved by adding spikes to the surface of the sphere. Well, you don't have to tell us twice! Here is the experiment.

Can a Picorover Climb a Slope?

The Picorover team consisting of Raul, Enric and Joshua (leader) are very busy with keeping up to speed with the development of the other rover concepts (Jaluro and WRV1). The Picorover concept has a lot to prove before it can be decided whether it is a feasible design for a lunar rover.

This video shows a feasibility study investigating the dynamical properties of Picorover on a slope. The technical details of the study can be found in Picorover Feasibility Study.

Scaled WRV1 wheel design for the Jaluro lunar rover

As some people have already noticed, one of the advantages of having several competing rover designs being developed in an open-source way is that they can share common components across the designs. An example of this is Jörg's impressive wheel design for his WRV1 lunar rover prototype, which is now also available in an up-scaled version that could be used for the Jaluro lunar rover prototype.

Jaluro is the two-wheeled rover design, while WRV1 is the four-wheeled rover design that can "bend" in the middle. Consequently, Jaluro achieves static stability by moving the center of mass below the axe and therefore needs larger wheels that the WRV1 rover.

WRV1 Lunar Rover:

From WRV1: Wheeled Rover Vehicle 1

Jaluro Lunar Rover:

From Jaluro: Just Another Lunar Rover

Sounds interesting? Feel free to contribute with your ideas in the discussion forums for the Jaluro and the WRV1 lunar rover prototypes.

Finished WRV1 wheels

I can tell you Jörg has been busy this week but now he has finished two wheels for the WRV1 lunar rover (and we still have the prototype with the disc hub). Have a nice weekend everybody - we'll be back next week with more news.

From WRV1: Wheeled Rover Vehicle 1

Steering Unit for the WRV1 Lunar Rover

The steering unit in the middle of the WRV1 lunar rover is a critical component because it defines the dynamical properties of the rover - in particular its ability to maneuver. Jörg has now manufactured the three key parts that allow the rover body to bend around two axes.

News from Vietnam

Inspired by our Open Source Communication Lab, our friends from Vietnam have started to play with software radios using the USRP and GNU Radio. After a few weeks of study they are now able to receive Automatic Picture Transmissions from the NOAA weather satellites as well as signals from current amateur radio satellites in low Earth orbit.

Inevitably, they have now formed a group of young engineers who are interested in ham radio, electronics, robots, astronomy and space exploration. At the moment, they work in the newly established FSpace lab of FPT Corp. where Thu (who is active on our forum) used to be a software engineer. He has now quit that job to pursuit his dream of space exploration.

Their current project is to design and manufacture a nanosatellite which will measure about 10x10x30cm and weight about 3kg. They expect to have it ready in 18 months (starting from 1/1/2009) and launch it to LEO (600-800km, sun-sync orbit) by the end of 2010. This is the first time they've ever worked in a real space mission. While they understand that there are many things to learn and many difficulties ahead, they are confident that they can do it if they try hard. Currently, they have 4 full-time people (Thu and the other 3 in the photo) and about 10 supporters/collaborators of the project.

From Communication Equipment

PS: Thu has recently passed his amateur radio exam and has now the callsign XV9AA.

Feature Recognition and Tracking

Autonomous feature recognition and tracking can be a useful navigational aid during the final phase of the lunar landing. This video shows a quick-hack prototype for recognizing and continuously tracking lines and circles at 15 frames per second (the red lines in the second part of the video).

Of course, the situation will be more difficult during lunar descent because deviations from mathematical lines and circles will occur. So there is still a lot of work to do :-)

Mooncast Simulation in HD

While working on our on-board video processing pipeline we reached a point where we needed a test video that would be representative of a mooncast for the Google Lunar X PRIZE. Using a regular video is not the best solution here because a mooncast has a different motion and color profile and these parameters can have great influence on the efficiency of the compression algorithms.
Therefore, we took some Apollo 17 surface photos from EVA 2 Station 4 (Shorty crater) and created a simulated mooncast consisting of a 360 degree pan. To make it a bit more entertaining we added some original voice recordings from the EVA.

The simulation uses stereographic projection, which allows panning and zooming in all directions. The vertical field of view is 60 degrees. The flickering of the small stones is an artifact of the projection algorithm and not the video compression. We will have to improve that.


Watch in HD


So what do you think? Is the quality good enough for a GLXP mooncast? Or is it too bad? Is the panning too slow or too fast? Leave your comments!

The Moon with a Webcam

I am working on a setup where I'm trying to mount a cheap webcam onto my Meade ETX-90 telescope for terrestrial observations. While I was working on the setup the other night I looked out the window and saw the Moon behind a tree. Without thinking too much I pointed the telescope towards the Moon and recorded this video.

Concerning the bad quality it should be noted that:

• It was recorded with a webcam
  
• It was recorded through a double-glas window (which was dirty)
  
• The Moon was behind a tree
  

I will try to improve on the setup, although I made it for a completely different purpose.