•Notícia

Enric Fernández, Raúl Cuadrado Santolaria, Andrés Petilo Pérez, Victor Kravchenko, Raquel González Rufián, Marta Jurado Vilar, and Roger Jove Casulleras, studying towards different degrees at the Castelldefels School of Technology (EPSC), make up the UPC-Barcelona Tech's team participating in the Google Lunar X PRIZE.

These students, led by Joshua Tristancho, are also part of the FREDNET team, whose members are primarily US university groups. They have embarked on a joint effort to place on the Moon a small robot named PicoRover, equipped with a built-in camera to send images from the lunar surface back to the Earth. Altogether, the effort brings 500 people from 64 countries together to share the dream of putting a device on the Moon. Their commitment, if they should win, is to give the proceeds of the award to an NGO.

Ever since it entered the competition in 2007, the EPSC group has developed several prototypes for the PicoRover—pico (for picogram) because it weighs less than 1 kilogram, and rover because it is a lunar explorer—using a spherical design that would allow it to move along the lunar surface with low gravity and an uneven surface of rock and ash. The goal is to develop a fully autonomous robot capable of moving or stopping on the lunar surface as required.

The team has also developed a controller for the device. It works with a small computer that only weighs two grams, is equipped with Wi-Fi, and is built into the ball.

The prototype that the group is currently working on is a ball with a 12-centimeter diameter housing a motor, a battery, a remote control system and a high-definition camera. The entire device weighs less than 250 grams. The ball is built with low-cost, common-use materials such as light bulbs, aluminum foil, and steel wire, but is capable of protecting its inner components from the high lunar temperatures and of climbing up sandy slopes at angles that are unprecedented for wheeled vehicles.

This is the area on which the EPSC group's efforts are currently focused. Using a counterweight system, PicoRover has modeled the behavior of a self-contained and self-propelled lunar exploration sphere, and has been tested on the sand at the beach of Castelldefels, near Barcelona. The results have been better than expected: for the time being, the ball has been able to hold its position on a sandy surface with a 33-degree slope. Any ball or wheel without spikes would roll back at a far smaller angle.

A lightweight mechanism involving a crown and a motor with a counterweight creates a Roly-Poly toy effect that enables the ball to roll in one direction without using four wheels. The PicoRover group has also included a hemispherical window housing a high-resolution camera that stays horizontal regardless of the position of the counterweight.


PicoRover's builders claim that the robot could operate on its own or as part of a group of PicoRovers communicating over a radio network, staying within a 100-meter range of each other so as not to lose communication. If this were to be done, it would be the first network of sensors to operate on the Moon.

The group is also focusing its efforts on developing antennas for sending the images back to the Earth after capturing them with a 353 high-definition camera manufactured by Elphel, one of the companies sponsoring the project.

To meet the competition's challenge, teams have to develop robots, satellite modules, and moon landing capsules, which will be sent into space from the Canary Islands in a launcher that can either be rented (with a cost ranging from $4 to $10 million) or built by the teams themselves (about $3 million).

The EPSC group is working in collaboration with faculty members and students in the school who specialize in several fields related to mini-satellite development and may be able to contribute to building their own mini-launcher, the WikiLauncher, if the competition calendar permits. There are participating faculty members in several UPC-Barcelona Tech departments, such as Daniel Crespo and Jordi Gutiérrez from the Department of Applied Physics and Sonia Pérez Mansilla from the Department of Applied Mathematics IV. Contacts have also been made to get other Spanish universities involved in the project.

FREDNET's entry in the competition is also unique in terms of its philosophy, which is based on sharing knowledge so that everyone can participate in the project. The team is led by US programmer Fred J. Bourgeois, and its goal is to bring together the efforts of professionals in science, engineering and technology from all around the world.

Many of the breakthroughs generated by this competition are expected to be used as prototypes or solutions that will then be transferred not only to major corporations but to the aerospace industry in general.

The FREDNET project sponsors are Elphel Inc, Hurricane Electric Internet Services, and US entrepreneur David Masten.

The team's main channel for communication is a web portal where participants can contribute their ideas and assess the different proposals and initiatives. The Google Lunar X PRIZE will be awarding $20 million to the first team to land a robot on the Moon, travel 500 meters over the lunar surface, and send images back to the Earth in real time. Google will award an extra $5 million to the team that also films and sends images of the sites of previous lunar missions.

The moon landing deadline for the competition is December 31, 2014, but there are plans to use a commercial launcher to which PicoRover would be delivered roughly during 2012, since the launcher needs almost two years to integrate the robot into its vehicle.