LEGO Rover Singapore

The project is about teaching kids on how to plan and execute rover missions on another planet. The mission is planned by mission control through a birds eye view of the surface through a webcam "satellite" and the mission can be executed by the rover using a blue tooth enabled phone via the app. The project teaches the challenges of space mission as it simulates real conditions such as signal delay, team work between mission and rover control and ultimately, fun!

This project is solving the Lego Rovers challenge.

Description

  • The prototype of the future interplanetary rover!

Hi, we are the Lego Rover Singapore team. We decided upon the Lego Rover challenge as the majority of our team members are passionate hard-core Lego, IT and space enthusiasts. We also thought it to be important as the project could better engage and enthuse young students towards space exploration and physically demonstrate the unique challenges facing remote operation of Mars spacecraft and the possibility of robot autonomy as a solution. With that in mind, we were able to build a remote operation system to control the Lego Robot via either a smartphone app or computer program and a separate remote monitoring and control system to mimic the real life operations of a overhead orbital satellite.The user interface for all three modules was designed to make it intuitive, interactive and easy to use for students and teachers to experiment with different instructions to the robot and satellite.

Educational value and implementation in a school setting:

The concept can be easily adopted and implemented by schools as the materials and resources are widely available and alternative can be easily found. For example students can be given a challenge to navigate an obstacle course in an adjacent room within a limited amount of time. The students are only allowed to view through the overhead webcam in the adjacent room (acting as the orbital satellite) or a camera on-board the robot. The team controls the robot using PC or mobile app. Feedback is via video feed from the overhead camera, onboard robot camera and sensors data. Time delay is increased progressively to simulate exploration of planets further away. Teams then decide how much time they should invest in making the robot more autonomous (making use of available sensors and programming) or master the skill of remote control robot. To increase the difficulty level, the robot control team could be put separate from the mission control team (not allowed to see each other's video feed).

Technical Features:

  • Robot software: Easy to program NXT-G (comes with LEGO set).
  • Semi autonomous, accept high level commands but execute these intelligently.
  • Sensors to look for and detect target resource.

  • Sensors to detect robot position and status.

  • Satellite Orbital: Processing (free).

  • Mimics satellite scan and delay.
  • Automatically track robot or target area.

  • Delay to simulate distance.

  • Mobile: Android (free).

  • Issue sequential commands to robot.
  • Delay to simulate distance.

LEGO Rovers Singapore team members

  • Kelvin Tan - Runs a robotics training company - Robot Building and Programming.
  • Eric Wong - IT consultant - Research, Ideas and collaboration.
  • Hui Han - Researcher - Orbital Imaging and Terrain Creation.
  • Russell Stanley - Programmer - Android Interface and Robot Control.

Project Information

License: GNU General Public License
Source Code/Project URL: https://github.com/hchin/space_apps_challenge

Resources

LEGO ROVER Singapore Photos - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31270005/LEGO_Rover_Singapore_Photos.rar
LEGO ROVER Singapore NXT-G - https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/31270005/LEGO_Rover_Singapore_NXT_G.rar
Setup guide - https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxB0leHoGPyISnJmN0FyTXQ4eDg/edit?usp=sharing
more pics! - https://www.dropbox.com/sh/uqzxq0chq2pc81o/DXRsC3J50o