Monday, July 21, 2008

Our Robot Arm

Here, two videos showing the robot arm of our lunar vehicle in experimental tests for reaching moving objects.
The arm has a cable mounted onboard the mobile platform of the vehicle, and it can easily reach several meters from its base on Earth with sufficient accuracy, and an even longer distance in low gravity, such as on the Moon.
Thus, its exploitation can indeed reduce the path to be travelled by the robot and even avoid a full descent of the craters of the Moon.






Thursday, July 10, 2008

CDR passed!

The Critical Design Review (CDR) of the eight projects selected
for the final phase of the ESA Lunar
Robotics Challenge competition
has taken place at
ESA’s European Space Research and
Technology Centre
(ESTEC), in the Netherlands, on 9 and 10 July.

Adriano, Riccardo and Felipe attended the meeting as representatives
of the
Pisa Lunatics Team, and they've just announced us that
our project has passed the CDR!

The project of the University of Pisa has also received several
comments from ESA experts and other teams that were quite to
the point and indeed very useful.

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Time For Critiques

Our major concern in the last weeks, the Critical Design Review, is going to be performed
in the next two days. The blog was a bit left aside for the lack of time, so...
First of all, here are a couple of pictures of our robot:



He looks smart in the second picture, doesn't he?
It is still just virtual, but we plan to make it real asap.
Wishing our best to the Adriano, Felipe and Riccardo for the CDR,
see you on next update!!