Feasibility Study of LUFAR

Abstract

With the steady increase in space missions, enabled through technological advances and increase of commercialisation within the space flight industry, both more and increasingly complex missions can be designed for space. To this end, the Lunar Zebro project competes within this field through its small lunar rover design, drastically decreasing deployment costs and risk of the mission. The road map of Lunar Zebro aims to have a multitude of rovers deployed on the Moon, being able to complete several tasks like exploring, observing, and mapping. Since this concept of rover cooperation adds a novel level of complexity to the mission, a feasibility study is required to look into the difficulties of navigating the Moon with a larger group of rovers. LunarSim is the software package developed during this project. LunarSim aims to facilitate a simulation environment in which Lunar Zebro rovers and space mission designs can be tested and validated. To legitimise the workings of the simulation, a few scenarios have been developed to test the core functionalities of the software product. These scenarios are based on phases in a practical mission plan that consists out of navigating to and observing a crater location. The scenarios is evaluated through examination of a set of defined fitness criteria. In this report, the reader will find documentation on the development process of LunarSim: the simulation in Unity, the ROS back-end, and the bridge between these two systems. Additionally, the report elaborates how the developed software was used to aid in the feasibility study of LUFAR. First, initial research and requirements are formulated to define the scope of the simulation, after which the software architecture is introduced. Then, the systems implemented for the simulation are explained. Subsequently, the implemented rover behaviour algorithm that was used for testing is explained, with additional resources on how to develop a new custom rover behaviour. After this, an evaluation is given of the simulation based on the initial requirements and research with future research and concluding remarks. At the end of the report, the technical specifications in terms of software architecture, simulation environment, and rover behaviour are defined to give an in-depth view of LunarSim.