The projects aims to improve team's existing know-how in the area of small autonomous vehicles, namely planetary rovers, operating in rough environments. Rovers have been consistently included in many exploration missions, and such an option will be even more important in the frame of upcoming, budget-minded smaller missions, carried on by single agencies and research centers to investigate limited areas of Moon or Mars. In such a frame, rovers could really provide significant scientific return. These rovers should be extremely efficient, and the project is intended to investigate optimal architectures for the mechanical and electrical subsystems of these vehicles. The goal is to identify optimized architecture to push up to reasonable edge the performance in terms of mass, power, energy, robustness, reliabiity, all of them concerned with peculiar, already identified specific missions in selected location and coarsely pre-defined path. In short, not a general purpose rover for planetary exploration, while instead an extremely specialized vehicle tuned for the specific soil and environment of a lunar or martian location, i.e. the target of the small mission. Based on consistent previous activities of the team-members, the project will include advanced simulation as well as preliminary prototyping steps, all developed in labs at Sapienza. The findings of the project coming from such a specialized design approach will help the team growth also with respect to other areas of applications for small rovers, as operations in hostile environments and surveillance vehicles.
