DIY Mars Rover

Presented by Dr Ian S An independently designed and built 6-wheel-drive and -steer Mars rover, with rocker-bogie suspension, loosely based on the Spirit/Opportunity rovers but with all-wheel steer like the ESA Rosalind Franklin rover. The head is capable of remotely controlled head and eye movement, voice recognition and limited vocal instruction following, and is mostly 3D printed. Voice recognition and reply synthesis is purely local. The body is constructed from aluminium extrusion and custom milled parts (on a DIY CNC mill) with a few 3D printed parts. It only just fits through a standard 70cm doorway, stands nearly 1m tall with the head attached, and weights 30kg+. All motors have encoders providing feedback to allow accurate control and tracking. Communication back to the base-station includes front hi-res, rear, and front infra-red cameras, and LIDAR mapping. Command and signal processing is done through the ROS2 framework for the major components and MQTT for the microprocessors. It includes two Raspberry Pi 4 computers for the main head and body control, two Pi Zeros for the non-head cameras, three Picos for the motor control, all within the main rover, carries its own WiFi network, and has another Pi and an Arduino in the remote control. This has been a multi-year spare-time project, with design work starting four years ago. All software and design details are being made publicly available.