6 Wheeled Mars rover design for terrain traversing, equipment servicing, astronaut assistance and on-board testing

Since the success of the Mars Pathfinder, a new chapter of space exploration began focusing on reducing the complexity of the rover and making it more autonomous, multifunctional, lightweight even at extreme adversities. A student based design for a competition allowed the researchers in this paper to explore a design that would meet those requirements. This paper presents the design of a six wheeled, triangular shaped chassis, having multi suspension based rover. This rover is integrated with a 2.4GHz communication system that not only allows the rover to be operated from a distance of 1km, but also allows the researchers to collect soil samples and test them on board the rover using a Microlab box. The rover also shows superior maneuverability by being able to turn 360° on the spot and able to scale obstacles of almost 1 feet. The performance of the design was also tested at a global competition — University Rover Challenge 2016 organized by The Mars Society held at Utah, USA, where this design came in 8th for the Phobos category. This competition only invited 30 rovers out of the 63 that applied from 12 different countries.