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77 Space Station and the Space Shuttle, for example, and one option identified by the agency was developing rovers for the Moon and Mars. “The agency found that the companies designing cameras for satellites struggled with developing ground vehicles, so it needed terrestrial partners to help them, and the two that were chosen were [Canadian aircraft maker] Bombardier and Argo Robotics,” says Visscher. “We put together some concepts that were well received.” The company provided the mechanical system for the prototype of a Moon rover called Juno, with the camera system and computers being supplied by Neptec Technologies. “The space programme was a great way to incubate the technology and foster that way of thinking – the whole idea of building lunar rovers in 2008 seemed a bit ridiculous, yet here we are with the only remaining lunar rover in Canada,” Visscher says. A key area of development is the wheels, as rubber can’t be used on the Moon or Mars, because as an organic material it becomes brittle in the low temperatures and pressures. This is even a problem with the alloys used to replace rubber, and is becoming evident on the Mars rovers, where the alloys used for the springs in the wheel suspension are having problems with brittleness during the bitter cold of the Martian night. “We have put in bids on a couple of contracts for the next generation of rover design for the CSA, and we need to produce a prototype that can be used in a vacuum chamber,” says Visscher. “The wheels were a really big project for us – it’s a very interesting design.” ODG came up with a new design of a larger wheel, made in titanium, that doesn’t need to steer around small obstacles but could simply drive over them. This simplifies the processing required for the autonomous operation and reduces the processing requirements on the camera system, as it only has to detect large obstacles. Visscher says, “It seems strange that the wheel at the bottom can affect the camera you have at the top of the vehicle – rugged simplicity from the ground up has this cascading effect on the whole system, reducing parts count and mass, so the reliability goes up.” ODG collaborated on a NASA experiment in Hawaii to add the new wheels to a lightweight rover, and drove it over 25 km of intensely rough terrain of rocks and lava, all without a single failure. “Now we are looking at designing the wheels so they can withstand cryogenic temperatures,” says Visscher. “That’s how a mechanical system reduces the need for a very sophisticated autonomous system, and the development of that system will be much simpler as it’s only the extreme slopes that we have to watch out for now; we can drive over everything else. “We also have only two drive motors – left and right – so it reduces the wiring complexity to a quarter of what it could be, and we need fewer sensors, so it’s a very different approach. It’s proven to be very robust: we have built about 40 prototype vehicles in the past five years, and haven’t seen a failure since the first one where we saw a mistake and corrected it.” This research is now spinning Space systems | Insight Rugged simplicity from the ground up has this cascading effect on the whole system, reducing parts count and mass, so the reliability goes up Unmanned Systems Technology | Summer 2015 Canadian company ODG has developed a titanium wheel for a future Moon rover