Robotics at IIST

July 31, 1971
Apollo 15 was the first moon landing to use the Lunar Roving Vehicle which greatly expanded the range and duration of each of the mission's EVAs. Dave Scott was the first to give it a test drive on this day 49 years ago.

The rover took about an hour to deploy, after which Scott had to initialise its navigation system, which required facing it away from the sun on as flat ground as he could find. There were minor problems: the front steering did not work that morning, and the seatbelts needed constant readjustment throughout the mission. Nonetheless, the rover more or less doubled the achievable workload: where previous first EVAs focussed on exiting the LM and deploying a suite of scientific instruments known as the ALSEP, Apollo 15 began with an excursion to two distant geological sites, deploying the ALSEP on return.

Curiosity used the telephoto lens on its Mast Camera to snap the high-resolution image. Altogether, it is made up of 1.8 billion pixels, revealing the Martian landscape in unprecedented detail.

The rover also used a medium-angle lens to produce a lower resolution version of just 650 million pixels, which also features the robot’s arm and front deck.

NASA's Curiosity just took the highest resolution panorama of Mars to date The rover is quite the photographer.

Toyota is Building a Pressurized Lunar Rover for Japan
JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, is teaming up with the nation’s largest company to build a lunar rover. Toyota, the second largest automobile company in the world (only Volkswagen makes more cars) has signed a development deal with JAXA that will last three years. The goal? To design, build, test and evaluate prototypes for a pressurized, crewed lunar vehicle that runs on fuel-cells.
JAXA and Toyota first signaled their intention to work together back in March, 2019. At that time, they envisioned a rover with a remarkable range of 10,000 km (6,200 miles). That’s huge, considering that the Moon’s circumference at the equator is just over 10,900 km (6,773 miles.)

In March, the pair proposed a vehicle with these properties:

Length: 6.0 m; width: 5.2 m; height: 3.8 m (19.5 ft; 17 ft; 12.4 ft. About the size of two micro-buses)
Living space: 13m3 (460 cu. ft.)
Capable of accommodating two people (four people in an emergency)
The rover will be an enclosed-body vehicle, rather than an open-body vehicle like the Apollo lunar rovers. Astronauts would be able to remove their spacesuits inside the rover, and live in it for fixed periods of time. They would be able to enter and exit the vehicle easily while wearing spacesuits, and could be controlled remotely, autonomously, or by astronauts themselves.
Back in March, JAXA President Hiroshi Yamakawa said, “Having Toyota join us in the challenge of international space exploration greatly strengthens our confidence. Manned rovers with pressurized cabins are an element that will play an important role in full-fledged exploration and use of the lunar surface.”
Now JAXA and Toyota have formalized their agreement, and a timeline:

Fiscal year 2019: Identifying technological elements that need to be developed for driving on the surface of the moon; drawing up specifications for a prototype rover.
Fiscal year 2020: Manufacturing test parts for each technological element; manufacturing a prototype rover.
Fiscal year 2021: Testing and evaluating both the manufactured test parts and the prototype rover.
The prototype will be a modified version of a standard production vehicle, though Toyota hasn’t said which one. (But we’re guessing it’s probably not the Yaris.)

Looking into the future, the tentative launch date for a mission to the Moon with this rover is 2029:
As an engineer, there is no greater joy than being able to participate in such a lunar project by way of Toyota’s car-making and, furthermore, by way of our technologies related to electrified vehicles, such as fuel cell batteries, and our technologies related to autonomous and automated driving,” said Shigeki Terashi, Toyota Executive Vice President. “I am filled with great excitement.”

For JAXA and Toyota, this project is not just about exploring the Moon. It’s also about developing technologies that contribute to better and cleaner transportation here on Earth. Fuel cells take in only oxygen, and emit only water.
Toyota believes that achieving a sustainable mobility society on Earth will involve the coexistence and widespread use of electrified vehicles, such as hybrid electric vehicles, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, battery electric vehicles, and fuel cell electric vehicles,” said Terashi. “For electrification, fuel cell batteries represent an indispensable technology.”

“Lunar gravity is one-sixth of that on Earth. Meanwhile, the moon has a complex terrain with craters, cliffs, and hills. Moreover, it is exposed to radiation and temperature conditions that are much harsher than those on Earth, as well as an ultra-high vacuum environment,” said JAXA Vice President Koichi Wakata. “For wide ranging human exploration of the moon, a pressurized rover that can travel more than 10,000 km in such environments is a necessity.”

JAXA and Toyota both have solid track records as innovators. JAXA’s Hayabusa 2 mission is currently gathering samples from asteroid Ryugu for return to Earth, their second sample return mission. Toyota is a pioneer in the alt-energy vehicle market with their Prius passenger car.

This partnership has great potential and it’ll be fascinating to see the results.

(like our page ISRO Newsletter� for regular updates)

CHANDRAYAAN-2 ROVER:

"Mobility of the rover in the unknown lunar terrain is accomplished by a ROCKER BOGIE Suspension system driven by six wheels. Brushless DC motors are used to drive the wheels to move along the desired path and steering is accomplished by differential speed of the wheels. The wheels are designed after the extensive modelling of the wheel-soil interaction, considering the lunar soil properties, sinkage and slippage results from a single wheel test bed. "

For more such insights, visit:

IAA FSE 17 06 02 Annadurai : INTERNATIONAL ACADEMY OF ASTRONAUTICS : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive Two ISRO papers from 10th IAA SYMPOSIUM ON THE FUTURE OF SPACE EXPLORATION: TOWARDS THE MOON VILLAGE AND BEYONDTitled:ROAD MAP TO BUILD CIVIL ENGINEERING...

"The ambulance-drone is capable of saving lives with an integrated defibrillator. The goal is to improve existing emergency infrastructure with a network of drones. This new type of drones can go over 100 km/h and reaches its destination within 1 minute, which increases chance of survival from 8% to 80%! This drone folds up and becomes a toolbox for all kind of emergency supplies."

TU Delft - Ambulance Drone Each year nearly a million people in Europe suffer from a cardiac arrest. A mere 8% survives due to slow response times of emergency services. The ambulance-...

The micro air vehicle laboratory or MAVlab for short, has built the world’s smallest autonomous racing drone! The drone has a diameter of 10 centimetres and weighs just 72 grams. With their design they are selected together with 8 other teams out of the 420 applicants, to compete in the 2019 AlphaPilot Challenge. 👉http://bit.ly/mavlab

Machine Learning Researchers have produced a system that can recreate lifelike motion from just a single frame of a person's face, opening up the possibility of animating not just photos but also paintings.

Video: https://youtu.be/p1b5aiTrGzY

Explained : https://techcrunch.com/

Few-Shot Adversarial Learning of Realistic Neural Talking Head Models Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.08233v1 Authors: Egor Zakharov, Aliaksandra Shysheya, Egor Burkov, Victor Lempitsky Abstract: Several recent works have sho...