yunwei-lunar-rover

Two astronauts may use the instruments installed in the parent vehicle which include electric drive devices, thermal imager and radar. The primary driver takes the responsibility of controlling the movement of the parent vehicle through a joystick as well as using the thermal imager and the radar. Meanwhile, the copilot may control the exploration process of the child vehicle with two joysticks, where one of the joystick is applied to control the child vehicle's process of moving forward and backward, turning, opening or closing the searchlight and the solar panels while the other is applied to control the operations of the robotic arm when collecting samples. Using Pod to observe the real-time images uploaded by the child vehicle is also another main task of the copilot.

The detection range of the child vehicle is a circle when we take the parent vehicle as center. The robotic arm equipped with 7 degrees of freedom is utilized to accomplish the sample collection work while the 360-degree LIDAR is applied to draw the real-time topographic map with a six-meter scanning radius. The 720p-standard wireless camera equipped in the front of our child vehicle can return the real-time images through the Pod installed on the parent vehicle. Moreover, the 480p tiny wireless camera installed on the robotic arm can be used to locate the samples when collecting them.

The following is the instruments and resources that we used during the development process of lunar rover. The thermal imager equipped on the parent vehicle was made by Seek Thermal. The 7075 aluminum alloy used for radar and the 6050 aluminum alloy used for robotic arm were both processed by CNC. Also, Saitek Cyborg V.1 Joystick is utilized as our joystick after circuit modification. The control system of both the parent vehicle and the child vehicle was developed on the Arduino open source hardware platform (www.arduino.cc). A 2.4G-frequency-band WiFi technology supports the forthputting of wireless communication. Finally, we use the servo of Power HD LF-20MG to control the system.

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