Author Archives: David Gump

Astrobotic’s Moon robot has begun mobility tests in the high bay of the Gates Computer Science building at Carnegie Mellon University.  This clip shows the first two prototypes out in the field, followed by P3 in the high bay, rolling past the cryogenic freezer, the walk-in oven for curing composite structures, and the vacuum chamber… {read more}

To protect the rover’s motors from the blistering heat of the lunar day, they are mounted inside the rover’s body. (This isn’t necessary in Mars’ chilly atmosphere; motors are placed out in the individual wheel hubs.) However, the motors’ gear trains eventually must emerge from the rover body to connect with the chain drives on… {read more}

The team has added key components to the rover’s interior, readying it for the first roll this week. The view above shows the rover interior with an IMU (inertial measurement unit) installed at the base of the camera mast, and the two small silvery motors and their larger golden yellow gear housings on either side.… {read more}

A great new animation by Aaron Davidson and his team shows how our solar-powered rover will explore the Moon, from lunar “skylights” into lava tubes to the Apollo 11 site: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVQSiUMTl5g

A walk-in oven for curing large composite pieces arrived this week at Carnegie Mellon’s Planetary Robotics Lab. The oven is especially useful for the pieces that will make up the spacecraft-lander that delivers our robot to the lunar surface. The oven’s floor includes two grooves for the wheels of the support cart that will hold… {read more}

A challenge in commanding a robot arm to carve up a target object with its router is precise understanding of where that object is located in “three space.” The team recently developed a process to locate the plane of its angle table (the baseline surface upon which an object rests) using a piezoelectric “button” that… {read more}