Mongol Barota: A next generation rover

Abstract

This paper scrutinizes Mongol Barota - a fully functional, stand-alone mobile platform rover which is capable to act as a human assistant to perform various scientific tasks in extreme adversities. The control system of the rover is designed in such a way that it can be commanded from a blind station within 1 kilometer range. It has successfully taken part in 8th annual University Rover Challenge organized by the Mars Society at the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) in the remote, barren desert of southern Utah, USA in late May, 2014. It has been traced out as the first entrance in this competition from Bangladesh and occupied 12th position out of 31 registered teams from 6 countries of 4 continents. The rover architecture maps the associated components to make it capable to perform the assigned tasks namely - Sample Return Task, Astronaut Assistance Task, Equipment Servicing Task and Terrain Traversing Task. Among these, the first task refers to search for the evidence to identify the existence of life after detailed analysis of collected soil sample from a selected site. In Equipment servicing task, rover has to perform a sequence of operations that mainly includes switching on a compressor and working with a series of pipes, hoses, valves and other such equipment. Astronaut assistance task intends the rover to collect tools from some given GPS locations and then delivery of each of them to the corresponding locations with provided GPS coordinates. Rover has to traverse an adverse terrain in order to pass through a set of target gates for completion of the terrain traversing task. This paper provides a detailed demonstration of the Mongol Barota rover, ins and outs of its architecture, facts and features, system components, logic, logistics and techniques adopted to implement several tasks representing its overall capabilities.