Three New Members for GLXP Rover Work at Tohoku University

Three new students have just started projects at Tohoku University to assist with the development of the moon rover for our mission to win the Google Lunar X PRIZE (GLXP). Welcome all of you to the team!

Andrea Gini - is an Information Technology professional, with extensive experience in software design and education, working as a professional consultant and as a teacher in training and certification courses. He has a master's degree in computer science, a master in scientific journalism and is currently attending the Masters of Science in Space Studies at the International Space University in France. Andrea's project will be to develop software to monitor and tele-operate the rover.


Roxanne Cote-Bigras - is a candidate for the B.Eng. in Electrical Engineering with focus on robotics and artificial intelligence at Sherbrooke University, Canada. She is now conducting research on the GLXP rover vision and positioning system. Her previous experiences include domestic robot design and implementation, as well as software development. Her fields of interest are autonomous life-support systems, guidance and navigation of mobile robotic platforms and artificial intelligence applied to human-robot interactions. She is also an active and devoted IEEE member in her local chapter.

David Jacquot-Letellier - is an undergraduate student currently studying Telecommunication Engineering, with a focus on Multimedia Technologies - involving Image and Sound Processing and Computer Science. During the course of his studies, he worked on various Signal Processing and Programming projects and was a member of his university's Robotics Association. He will soon be assigned to one of the ongoing projects within the laboratory related to planetary rover missions.

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NASA Moon Rover Tire Recreated from Spare

Now 80 years old, Farence Pavlicks (apologies if the spelling is wrong), invented the Lunar Roving Vehicle tires used in the Apollo Program while working for General Motors' Defense Research Labs back in the 1950's. The tires were manufactured by Goodyear and consisted of zinc-coated woven steel wires in place of the rubber compounds normally used for tires on Earth.

After NASA lost all traces of information on the design and manufacturing of the lunar rover tires, they used his advice to recreate the original design in a project redeveloping new tires to support the NASA return to the Moon.

Follow this link to hear the complete story by NPR News.

Let's hope NASA is able to recover all the other knowledge gained during the Apollo program needed to for their return to the Moon. The need to re-capture that knowledge is surely a big driver for NASA to stick with its plans to return the Moon in the coming decade.

Rover Pimp-off, MER vs Lunakhod

We thought it would be interesting to compare two of the most pimped rover designs of all time.

NASA's two Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) Spirit and Opportunity landed on Mars in early 2004 and are still going strong, racking up impressive distances over the red planet. But way back in the 1970s the Soviet Union landed two equally impressive rovers of its own on the Moon in the Lunakhod programme.

Let's have a look at some key statistics:

Compared to MER, the Lunakhod is more than 4 times the weight, making it a veritable tank. But after almost half a century, NASA will finally catch up on that statistic with its upcoming Mars Science Laboratory rover mission, which will weigh even more than the Lunakhod rovers.

MER Opportunity started its explorations of Mars in January 2004 from its "hole in one" landing site in a martian crater, shown in the below photograph, which was taken from Mars orbit by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Since then it has covered an impressive 11.7km of Martian surface, but that is still far short of the 37km achieved by Lunakhod 2. But with both MER rovers are still alive and moving that record may yet fall.

Driving rovers around the Moon is far quicker than on Mars. The round trip time communications delay to the Moon is only a couple of seconds, meaning that a driver on Earth can control a lunar rover in near real-time. The Lunakhod rovers were driven in this manner, controlled by a five-man team of controllers (pictured below) who used TV images taken by the rover's three low-rate TV cameras.

Unlike lunar rovers, Mars rovers have a far greater communications delay to Earth (many minutes) meaning that their route must be pre-programmed with navigation waypoints, hence the lower speed of the MER design.

The Google Lunar X PRIZE (GLXP) mission won't require rovers anywhere near as big as these two giants, but it may be able to re-use at least some aspects of their designs such as navigation software and communications hardware. GLXP teams will have some freedom to choose their rovers' speed since the 500m roving requirement is not very demanding. However, to make their missions more profitable, teams might consider using a relatively high speed rover in order to enable other commercial activities after the primary GLXP mission is completed but before the approximately two weeks of lunar daylight is exhausted.

Sources :

• JPL's Opportunity mission update page


• Timeline of Soviet Lunar Exploration


• http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f1/Oppland02a.jpg


• http://vsm.host.ru/e_lunhod.htm

Tohoku University Space Robotics Lab to Develop GLXP Rover

In our newest partnership, the Space Robotics Lab at Tohoku Univeristy Aerospace Engineering Department will work with us to design a rover for our Google Lunar X PRIZE mission. The Space Robotics lab is led by Professor Kazuya Yoshida and is one of the top robotics labs in Japan.

Its recent achievements include:

• an IEEE prize-winning contribution to Japan's free-flying space robot project ETS-VII (similar to the Orbital Express mission of the USA)
• contributions to design of the sample acquisition mechanism and touch-and-go sampling sequence of the Hayabusa asteroid sample return mission
• 1st and 2nd prizes at the 2006 ARLISS comeback competition
• development of the 50kg SPRITE-SAT, will be launched on JAXA's H-IIA rocket in early 2009

The Moon in 3D

The concept of 3D video and television has been around for quite a while now, but it is slowly becoming a reality. Viewers in Japan can already receive an hour a day of 3D broadcasts, which can be viewed on special LCD TVs with polarized glasses.

Philips is even working on a system (WOWvx)to do away with the glasses, allowing the whole family to enjoy 3D images just the way we enjoy normal TV now!

But regardless of the way we view 3D images and movies, they have to be recorded first! And that generally means 2 cameras, with a spacing similar to the human eye, recording in sync. From this, 3D scenes can be rendered and, on the Moon, scientific data can be obtained (distances, crater depths etc.) opening up a whole new prospect for in-situ geology. Coupled with this, having a 3D image of the scene makes tele-operation of a lunar rover much more manageable.

Remember: this isn't like the Mars rovers with a little training, a human operator can get used to the delay and adapt to real-time operations on the lunar surface. So should we record the Moon in 3D? Definitely! After all, why take one camera, when you could take two!

Robotic Exploration Problem Featured in ICFP Contest

This year's ICFP Contest might help bring space-related AI challenges to the the attention of the programming languages community. The task of the contest is to deploy control software for a Martian lander and steer a rover from its starting position to its home base.

While the details of the task are abstracted from real deployment scenarios or even tongue-in-cheek, the fundamental idea is a point of very much debate and research. Increased autonomy of spacecraft and rovers is very much a multi-dimensional optimisation challenge in terms of science return and safety.

Communication with spacecraft increases in cost the further away the object is from Earth. On the other hand, the science instruments may detect interesting events that require timely action. The event might not be over before decision makers in mission control are able to update the schedule.

This is where increased autonomy might come into play. Of course, the safety of the mission must not be compromised by having the spacecraft issue commands that impact its own functioning. But science return might be increased significantly by identifying simply cases where the vehicle is allowed to deviate from its given schedule and return to normal operation after ad-hoc observation that were triggered by certain events.

Ideally, software tools should be adapted to quantify the benefits, impacts and drawbacks of such ideas. White Label Space hopes that the passionate participants of contests like this year's ICFP Contest help enlarge the pool of technologies from which the space community can draw their technologies.