Mars Rover – Martian Landscape Simulator Environment

As a results of a large amount of interest from the educational community, we have begun work on adding a simulated mars rover and Martian landscape to the simulator. This is also a great opportunity for us to add a large outdoor landscape to robotSim.

Authenticity was important so we began by using actual NASA data as the basis for our terrain map.

This is also by far the largest environment we have added to the sim, and there will a vast world for simulated rovers and other robots to explore. Work is also underway for creation of the simulated Opportunity rover. In the meantime, during development we’re using an iRobot Packbot to explore the terrain.

As seen from the insets below, the explorable area is vast:

The environment will simulate the gravity on Mars and will contain features that the robots can interact with.

The simulated Mars environment will be available in the upcoming robotSuite 1.5 release.

~ by robotsim on June 23, 2008.