The Lunar Rover Mini: towards a Versatile, Open-Source Mobile Robotic Platform for Educational and Experimental Purposes

Abstract

In this paper we introduce the Lunar Rover Mini (LRM), a ground-based mini robot based on the ExoMars rover developed by ESA. The goal of the LRM project is to serve as a low-cost educational and experimentation platform, not only for EXOMARS-like locomotion and mechanics, but also for intelligent robot programming and operation. With a software framework based on a variety of open-source components developed at the DLR Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, the LRM is an easily transportable mobile device that hosts an infrastructure to substitute and deploy modular software packages. As current focus in the research domain is on highly autonomous functionalities, a testing platform that provides the necessary hardware is much sought after. In combination with its modular software framework, the LRM serves as a platform for students, researchers and engineers to develop and test new software packages, with the aim of continuously improving its capabilities. Among the ongoing projects is the implementation of a visualinertial SLAM algorithm, which simultaneously estimates a map of the rover's environment and its past trajectory by fusing information from captured stereo image pairs with measurements from an on-board IMU. A recently finished contribution is the development of a Human-Machine Interface for teleoperating the rover over an external controller, consisting of an extended smartphone with a 6 DoF control device over the phone's USB port. This successfully developed controller might potentially be deployed on other robots, which demonstrates the ultimate purpose of the LRM project.