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Lunar Rover Initiative (LRD)
This project is no longer active.

Head: William Red L. Whittaker

Mailing address:
LRI (lri-feedback@frc.ri.cmu.edu)

Associated center: FRC

For more information, see this project's homepage.

Carnegie Mellon University, in conjunction with LunaCorp, Inc., of Arlington, Virginia, will conduct the first private lunar mission, landing a pair of teleoperated robotic vehicles on the Moon's surface. A central goal of the mission is to provide the public its first opportunity to directly participate in space exploration. Researcher's at the Robotics Institute at CMU in Pittsburgh, will design and build the Moon rovers. The customers for the mission include a theme park, television network, commercial sponsors, and scientists. A variety of educational events and activities will be coordinated with the sponsors and other interested organizations.

Name - Title <Email Address>
• Dimitrios Apostolopoulos - Senior Systems Scientist <da1v@cs.cmu.edu>
• Deepak Bapna - PhD Student, RI
• [Home] H. Benjamin Brown - Project Scientist <hbb@cs.cmu.edu>
• Jesse Easudes - Visiting Engineer
• Alex Foessel - PhD Student, RI
• [Home] Terrence W Fong - Postdoctoral Fellow
• [Home] Martial Hebert - Professor <hebert@ri.cmu.edu>
• Lalitesh Katragadda - Postdoctoral Fellow
• [Home] Alonzo Kelly - Associate Professor <alonzo@ri.cmu.edu>
• [Home] Eric Krotkov - Courtesy Adjunct Faculty (Adjunct) <krotkov@cytometrics.com>
• [Home] Andrew Mor - Adjunct Faculty (Adjunct) <abm+@ri.cmu.edu>
• John Murphy - PhD Student, RI
• Eric Rollins - Senior Research Engineer
• Jack Silberman - PhD Student, CivE
• [Home] Reid Simmons - Research Prof/Assoc Dir Educ/PhD Chair <reids@cs.cmu.edu>
• [Home] William Red L. Whittaker - University Professor <red@ri.cmu.edu>

• Daedalus - We deveopled Daedalus, a six-legged frame-walker with efficient redundant drive systems, for extreme terrain missions as part of the Lunar Rover Initiative.
• Lunar Rover Navigation - Carnegie Mellon researchers are creating the prototype for a new lunar rover that can navigate rugged terrain autonomously and under supervisory control over thousands of kilometers of terrain. As part of this Lunar Rover Initiative, the LRD Navigation Group is developing the navigation system of the rover.
• Robotic All Terrain Lunar Exploration Rover - Ratler is a battery-powered, four-wheeled, skid-steered vehicle used as a testbed to develop the remote driving techniques needed for a lunar mission.

Note: This list may not be comprehensive. It contains only those publications in the RI publications database. Entries are listed in reverse chronological order.

• Human Supervision of Robotic Site Survey
  D. Schreckenghost, T.W. Fong, and T. Milam
  6th Conference on Human/Robotic Technology and the Vision for Space Exploration, February, 2008. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [502 KB] copyrighted

• Robotic Site Survey at Haughton Crater
  T.W. Fong, M. Allan, X. Bouyssounouse, M.G. Bualat, M. Deans, L. Edwards, L. Flückiger, L. Keely, S.Y. Lee, D. Lees, V. To, and H. Utz
  9th International Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Automation in Space, February, 2008. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [1570 KB] copyrighted

• Rover Configuration for Exploring Lunar Craters
  J. Ziglar
  tech. report CMU-RI-TR-07-42, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, December, 2007. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [6427 KB] copyrighted

• Synergy: A Language and Framework for Robot Design
  L. Katragadda
  doctoral dissertation, tech. report CMU-RI-TR-98-16, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, December, 1997. [Abstract]
  Download: pdf [3291 KB] copyrighted