Lunar Zebro (TU Delft)
"World's smallest and lightest rover yet, built by TU Delft students to be sent to the Moon."
TU Delft student team building Lunar Zebro, a six-legged shoebox-sized nano rover billed as the world's smallest and lightest, for a Moon launch NET 2028.
Lunar Zebro is a student-run space robotics project at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands. It is building what the team calls the world's smallest and lightest lunar rover. The project grew out of the Zebro legged-robot research line at TU Delft, which produced its first Zebro robot in 2013. That design was inspired by the RHex hexapod and favoured simple, robust mechanics that keep moving in poor conditions. Over several generations the team built Zebros in various sizes, from very small Pico versions up to larger test platforms. After a Zebro was shown to the Indian Space Research Organisation, the work turned towards space. Around 2017 the team settled on the Micro Zebro size and began exploring swarms of small cooperating rovers as a way to lower the risk of a single point of failure on the Moon.
The flight rover is shoebox-sized and walks on six independently controlled leg modules, set asymmetrically on each side of the body for stability. Each leg is driven by a space-grade motor housed with a temperature sensor and a Hall sensor. Each leg also has its own reflex control, which protects it from overheating and overcurrent and lets it adapt to terrain and step over obstacles as tall as itself. Navigation uses SHRIMP, an in-house stereo camera of under 3 grams, together with 6-axis IMUs and an obstacle-avoidance algorithm that detects obstacles about 2 metres ahead. This Semi-Autonomous Navigation System (SANS) steers the rover around craters and boulders larger than itself. The command and data handling module has two on-board computers and two memory modules. Power comes from 12 space-grade solar cells on a deployable panel, an in-house battery management system and four batteries that take about three hours to charge. A custom communications board, power amplifier and four-bar antenna deployment mechanism keep a monopole antenna vertical for direct-to-Earth links.
The planned mission is to ride as a secondary payload on a commercial or national lunar lander, with launch no earlier than 2028. On the surface the rover would walk out of the lander's shadow, survive one lunar day (about 14 Earth days), report its location and health directly to Earth, and test its six-legged locomotion. It would also image the ground around the lander to study landing effects and photograph the lander and Earth, then hibernate through the -233 C lunar night. The team has tested terrestrial Zebros in analogue campaigns, including ESA ESTEC's Mars Yard and the EMMIHS-III campaign at HI-SEAS in Hawaii in 2020, as well as test terrain at Decos in Noordwijk. The project is based in TU Delft Building 36 on Mekelweg and is funded through sponsors and partners.
Primary type & automation activities this supplier delivers:
Lunar Zebro rover
Shoebox-sized six-legged lunar nano rover with per-leg reflex control, a <3 g SHRIMP stereo camera and semi-autonomous obstacle avoidance; launch NET 2028.
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Contact Lunar Zebro (TU Delft)
WEBSITE
https://zebro.tudelft.nlHEADQUARTERS
Netherlands
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Research Institute
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Primary Region
Europe
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Grant / Non-profit
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