Spanish Students Aim for the Moon

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Spanish Students Aim for the Moon
Wednesday, June 16, 2010 - Anuradha Menon
Home >> Picture Of The Day >> Robots

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PicoRover – pico for picogram because it weighs less than 1kg, and rover because it is a lunar explorer – employs a spherical design that will allow it to move along the low gravity and uneven surface of rock and ash of the lunar surface. The team from the Castelldefels School of Technology (EPSC), part of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) - Barcelona Tech in Spain, has also developed a controller for the device. It works with a small computer built into the ball that weighs only 2g and is equipped with Wi-Fi.

For sending images back to Earth, the robot is equipped with a 353 high-definition camera manufactured by Elphel, one of the companies sponsoring the project. The group is working on developing antennas for sending the images captured with the camera back to Earth. The ESPC group has developed several prototypes of the PicoRover with the goal of developing a fully autonomous robot capable of moving or stopping as required on the lunar surface. The prototype on which the group is currently working is a ball measuring 12cm in diameter that houses a motor, battery, remote control system and a high-definition camera. The entire device weighs less than 250g and, like most school projects, the ball is built from low-cost, common-use materials such as light bulbs, aluminum foil, and steel wire. However, the ball is capable of protecting its inner components from the high lunar temperatures and of climbing up sandy slopes at angles of up to 30° – a feat that can tax wheeled vehicles.

(Source: Frednet)