FY2011 Night Rover Centennial Challenge

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Hello!

In a previous post, I pointed out that there doesn't appear to be much in the way of benchmarks to compare against for NASA's FY2011 Night Rover Centennial Challenge. From what we know about the Challenge today, competitors will have to operate a rover through several day-night cycles using a renewable power source. It's unknown if those cycles will be w/ reference to Earth (24 hr) or the Moon (14 day). Unlike other planetary rovers (the MERs), I'm guessing they would like the 'Night Rover' to be able to actually drive through the night.

In an attempt to determine a benchmark for continuous rover driving operation, I considered how long an off-the-shelf R/C car would drive for, relatively unaltered. After searching the internet for many hours, I found many speed records for R/C Cars, but never a distance / duration record. Therefore, I decided to test things out on my own.

So far, I've driven my Long Duration Rover for 1.5 miles for 24 minutes (continuous) so far, and I'm going to continue testing today, and keep going until it's AA batteries fail. I'm guestimating I'll get 1.5 hours of run time, with up to 11 miles of range.

Details and progress of the test are available here:

http://web.me.com/daniel.gillies/Long_Duration_Rover_Project/Home.html

Once some sort of benchmark is set, I'll work on modifying the car (batteries, motor, solar charging) to push the mark further. Perhaps someone on NSF out there interested in this challenge would even be willing to beat my personal records as I set them, and we can have our own mini long duration rover challenge in prep for Night Rover next year

Anyways, look forward to your comments - I'll post updates here whenever the blog is updated with a new test or development.

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Update: Endurance testing continued today - now up to 1hr 21 minutes total run time, 5.1 miles range...and still going. More testing to come. Follow at the link in the first post, and feel free to comment on the blog.

Also, I made a mistake on my first guestimate calculation. Per the initial numbers I'm thinking 1.5 hours of run time, however that would equal 5.7 miles, not 11 miles of range, based on the initial average speed. The problem with my calculation is I don't know at what voltage the rover will lack the power to push itself along. Testing will tell!

It's amazing what 4x AA batteries will do....and to think, the Centennial Challenge Night Rovers will probably be orders of magnitude more capable.