IRJET-LRMSE: A Framework on Lunar Rover for Moon Surface Exploration

International Research Journal of Engineering and Technology (IRJET) e-ISSN: 2395-0056
Volume: 06 Issue: 05 | May 2019 www.irjet.net p-ISSN: 2395-0072
© 2019, IRJET | Impact Factor value: 7.211 | ISO 9001:2008 Certified Journal | Page 4932
LRMSE: A Framework on Lunar Rover for Moon Surface Exploration
Gamana R1, Ranjitha N1, Swathi Bai R1, Akshatha S1, Vallabh Mahale2
18th Semester Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Jyothy institute of Technology,
Bangalore, India
2Asst.Professor Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Jyothy Institute of Technology,
Bangalore, India
---------------------------------------------------------------------***----------------------------------------------------------------------
Abstract:- An economical robotwhichutilisestheRocker-
Bogie linkage, which is also used by NASA’s Curiosity; to
facilitate all terrain movement. The rover has 6 wheels with
independent motors mounted to the linkage. The electronic
components are mounted on a main chassis. The robot also
consists of an ultrasonic sensor for obstacledetectionand an
android phone forlivecamera feedandaccelerometervalues
transmitted via a Bluetooth module. Whilethisisintendedto
model a space rover, it has terrestrial applicationstoo. These
include mappingandsurveyingunknownlocationsaswell as
locating survivors in wreckage and live feed.
Keywords – Lunar rover, Hardware Components,Object
detection Module.
I. INTRODUCTION
A planetary rover is a space exploration vehicle designed to
move across the surface of a celestial body. Theadvantageof
a rover over an orbiting spacecraft is its ability to make
microscopic observations and conduct physical
experimentation. A rover is required to be reliable, compact
and autonomous as farasnavigationanddata acquisition are
concerned. NASA’s currentdesignusesa twowheeledrocker
arm on a passive pivot attached to a main bogie on the
opposite side (Bickler, 2004). Miller et al (2002) discussed
the need for rovers with higher traversal speeds for future
planetary missions.
They described a method of driving a rocker bogie linkage
which can effectively step over most obstacles instead of
impacting them, preventing high dynamic shocks. Barlas
(2004) discussed the different types of suspension systems
of wheeled locomotion which are required to be simple,
lightweight, and have spring-less connections to maintain
equal traction and be able to distribute load equally to each
wheel and prevent slipping. Tarokh et al. (1999) have
described a rigorous method for the kinematic modelling of
the Rocky 7 Moon Rover in terms of measured wheel
velocities and certain rocker joint angles. Stone (1996)
described the design of NASA’s Moon Pathfinder and its
various subsystems. Patel et al. (2010) have provided the
locomotion subsystem analysis of the Exomoon rover
developed by ESA – a 3 bogie concept with flexible metallic
wheels, body pose adjustment capability and 6-wheel
steering. The paper focused on the suspension mechanism
performance and wheel performance. Kim et al. (2011)
presented an optimal design of a wheel type mobile robot
with high stability and excellent adaptability while climbing
stairs using the Taguchi model for optimization. Harrington
et al. (2004) discussed the design of a lightweight, compact
mechanism for the Moon Exploration Rover. It also
highlighted the various latch and deployment mechanisms
employed.
II. ROVER MODULE
Hardware Components
Arduino
Arduino is an open source platform used for building
electronics projects based on easy to use hardware and
software. Arduino boards are able to read the inputs such as
light on sensor, a finger on a button, or a twitter message
which turn it into an output such as activating a motor,
turning on an LED and publishing something online. The
UNO is one of the more popular board in Arduino family.
The Arduino platform as becomea quitepopularwithpeople
just starting out with electronics because the Arduino IDE
uses a simplified version of c++, making it easier to the
people who just started out with the electronics.Unlikemost
previous
Fig-1: Arduino Board

programmable circuit boards, the Arduino does not need a
separate piece of hardware (called a programmer) in order
to load new code onto the board you can simply use the USB
cable. Arduino consists of both a physical programmable
circuit board (often referred to as a microcontroller) and a
piece of software, or IDE (Integrated Development
Environment) that runs on your computer,usedto writeand
upload computer code to the physical board.
L293D Motor Driver:
L293D is a typical Motor driver or Motor Driver IC which
allows DC motor to drive on either direction. 12 volts DC
Motor is a frequency of rotation 100 rpm (Revolution Per
Minute) that is the number of rotations arounda fixedaxisin
one minute. L293D is a 16-pin IC which can control a set of
two DC Motors.
Motor1 consists of set of two wheels MA1 and MA2 to the
right of the robot module. Motor2 consists of another set of
wheels such as MB1 and MB2 to left of the robot module. If
the rover wants to move to right then it stops the Motor1
and Motor2 start working and so on…and it is shown in
table.
Ultrasonic Sensor:
The HC-SR04 Ultrasonic sensor module used to measure
distance from 2cm to 400cm with an accuracy depends on
the environmental temperature. The module includes
ultrasonic transmitter, receiver and a control circuit. The
transmitter at the
Direction MOTOR A MOTOR B
MA1(+) MA2(-) MB1(+) MB2(-)
Forward 1 0 1 0
Backward 0 1 0 1
Left 0 0 1 0
Right 1 0 0 0
stop 0 0 0 0
module transmits an ultrasonic sound of 40KHZ.this sound
will reflect back if the object is present in front of it. The
reflected sound is received by the receiver present in the
module. The distance can be calculated by measuring the
time and speed of sound.
The module as 4-pins such as vcc, trigger, echo and ground
Fig-2: Ultrasonic Sensor
DHT11 Sensor [temperature and Humidity]
DHT11 sensor temperature range from 0-50ºc/± 2ºc.The
operating voltage is between 3volts to 5volts. Maximum
current required during measuring the temperature and
humidity using DHT11 sensor it requires 2.5mA current.
DHT11 sensor is integrated with a high-performance 8-bit
microcontroller. Sampling rate is 1HZ that is one reading
every second and the overall size of the body is 15.5mm x
12mm x 5.5mm.
Soil Moisture:
Soil moisture sensor measures the volumetric water
content in soil. Since the directgravimetricmeasurement of
free-soil moisture requires removing,dryingandweighting
of a sample,
Fig-3: DHT11 Sensor
soil moisture sensors measure the volumetricwatercontent
indirectly by using some other property of soil such as
electrical resistance, dielectric constant, or interaction with
neutrons, as a proxy for the moisture content.
Technologies Commonly used to indirectly measure
volumetric water content (include soil moisture) are:
Frequency Domain Reflectometry (FDR), Time Domain
Transmission (TDT) and Time Domain Reflectometry(TDR)

Fig-4: Soil Moisture Sensor
LCD:
LCD is an interface with the Arduino interface liquid crystal
display (LCD) with an arduino to provide userinterface.LCD
is commonly used to display the data in devices such as
reading of the temperature, humidity etc.…
WORKING:
Arduino is an open source platform that comes with its own
IDE and is significantly simpler to code than many other
microcontrollers, as it already has a vast set of libraries
available. Hence an Arduino Uno board was preferred over
an MSP 430 or other similar microcontrollers. The motors
were
Fig-5: Liquid Crystal Display
controlled using motor driver ICs. The motor driver works
on the principle of a dual H-bridge. If the inputs to the motor
driver are LOW and HIGH, the shaft rotates in a direction
such that the rover moves forward, and vice versa. If both
the inputs are LOW (or HIGH) the motor stops, since there is
no current flowing through the motor. To turn the rover to
the right, the wheels on the right side are made to rotate in
the reverse direction and the ones on the left are moved
forward. In the opposite manner, the rover is turned left. So,
the rover turns about its geometric centre. Due to limited
availability of pins on an Arduino Uno board, thecontrols for
the motors on each side were common. The motor controls
were lumped so as to reduce the code size and adhere to the
code limit of an Uno, which is 16KB. Autonomous control
was the default control state of the rover and can be
manually controlled by an override via the app. An
Ultrasonic sensor HC-SR04 was usedtodetectobstacles.The
sensor has four pins – trig, echo, Vcc and GND. Trig emits
ultrasonic pulses for 10 microseconds when the pin is set to
HIGH. The echo pin is set to HIGH when it receives a pulse.
The duration between two successive instances of echo
becoming HIGH is measured; andthedistanceoftheobstacle
calculated. The rover moves forward by default. When it
detects an obstacle in front, it again triggerstheleftand right
sensors, measures the distances of the obstacles to its left
and right, and finally moves in the direction in which it has
more space.[1][2]
III.OBJECT DETECTION MODULE
Raspberry Pi is B model andLinux-basedmicrocontroller.
It acts as minicomputer that connects all peripheralsused by
computer like keyboard, TV or monitor, mouse, SD card slot
for loading operating, Ethernet port for LAN cable
connection, 4 USB ports for connecting I/O devices, HDMI
port for connecting monitor or HD TVs, memory, power
source, memory, video/audio outputs and camera
interface(CSI)
Fig-6: RaspberryPi
The RaspberryPi operating system can also be access by
remote login through PC screen, with LAN cable.
RaspberryPi 2 Model B boards has 40 I/O pins with 2.54mm
which is marked as P1 and arranged in 2x20 strips includes
UART, I2C, SPI, +3.3V, +5V and GND supply. It uses 900MHz
quad-core Broadcom BCM2835 which is of ARM cortex A7
family. It has 1GB of built in RAM. Linux based operating
system is loaded into SD card which includesseveral steps to
load operating system into micro SD card and then plug into
SD card slot. Ubuntu or any linux-based operating system
can be used, Rasp bian-Jessie is the operating systemusedin
this system which can be directly downloaded from the
official RaspberryPi website.[5]
GPIO pin in RaspberryPi 2 advanced Model Bboardisshown
in Fig.8. The first 26 pin are same as RaspberryPi 1 A/B
boards. Additional 14 pins provide ground and GPIO pins.

GPIO pins provide different alternate functions like SPI, I2C,
PWM and so. All GPIO p ins are reconfigurable. There are
two I2C b uses on P1 and P5 respectively and one SPIbus.[6]
The raspberry pi-based obstacle avoiding robot consist of
three main modules i.e. camera module, raspberry pi, motor
drivers. The camera module gets the input image which are
obtained are real time operation. The raspberry pi is a
platform consisting of all necessary hardware module
assembled on it. It receives the images from camera module.
It carries out image processingandcheckswhetherthere are
any obstacles in path of the robot and if any obstacle occurs
then it will send the signal further to motor driver
accordingly. The motor driver actually consists of two sub
motors i.e. right and left motor. These motors receive the
signal from raspberry pi in case of any appearance of the
obstacle in its path the motors work accordingly to signal
and moves in left or right direction with the help of left and
right motor to avoid the obstacles.[4]
IV.STRUCTURE CHART
In the LRMSE, Arduino board is used along with the sensors
such as DHT11, two L293D Motor Driver Module where one
L293D motor driver is connected to the front wheelssuchas
motor1 and motor2 than the another L293D motor driver
module is connected to rear wheels such as motor3 and
motor4.
The raspberry pi module is used for imageprocessingwhere
the camera captures the image and that image is givenasthe
input where the processing of the image takes placethrough
the raspberry pi module and shape and colour of the
obstacle is given as the output. The Temperature, Humidity
results where calibrated.
Fig-7: Flow Chart of Raspberry Pi obstacle avoiding robot
Fig-6: Structure Chart
V. FLOWCHART
In the LRMSE, Read the sensors attached to the
Arduino board and raspberry pi module where it is given as
the input along the captured image of the obstacle and
displays thetemperature,humidityandcarbondioxide.Then
the ultrasonic sensors are used measure the distance by
using ultrasonic waves. The sensor head emits an ultrasonic
wave and receives the wave reflected back from the target.
Ultrasonic sensor measures the distance to the target by
measuring the time between the emission and reception.
If the obstacle found at left it rest over there and capture the
image where the series of commandisgiventotheraspberry
pi to process the captured image in order to produce the
shape and colour of the obstacle. Finally, it displays the
colour and shape of the object and move towards the right
Fig-6: Flow Chart

If the obstacle found at middle it rests over there and
capture the image where the series of command is given to
the raspberry pi to process the captured image in order to
produce the shape and colour of the obstacle. Finally, it
displays the colour and shape of the object and move
towards its original position.
If the obstacle found at right it rests over there and capture
the image where the series of command is given to the
raspberry pi to process the captured image in order to
produce the shape and colour of the obstacle. Finally, it
displays the colour and shape of the object and move
towards the left.
CONCLUSION
The robot will be able to move as per the command given
after detecting the obstacle through the camera module.
When the video frame containing the obstacle is detected
using the image processing algorithm the pi will command
the motor as per the directions i.e. left or right and it will
change its path accordingly.
REFERENCES
[1] Xiang Yi, Bingjian Wang “Obstacles detection method of
vehicles based on image analysis”, 20th International
Conference on Information Fusion Xi'an, China - July 10-
13, 2017.
[2] Cui Pingyuan Yue Fuzhan Cui Hutao “Research on
Autonomous Navigation of Lunar Rovers for the Moon
Exploration” Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE International
Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics December 17 -
20, 2006, Kunming, China.
[3] Wan Rahiman, Chin Swee Seng, & Sharmin Ahmed
“Autonomous Vehicle: An EfficientApproachforObstacle
Detection Aided by Image Processing”
[4] Basel Fardi, Jaroslav Dou'sa, Gerd Wanielik, Bjorn Elias,
Alexander Barke “Obstacle Detection and Pedestrian
Recognition UsingA3DPMDCamera”IntelligentVehicles
Symposium 2006, June 13-15, 2006, Tokyo, Japan
[5] “Target Detection Using Image Processing Techniques”
Jacob Hartmann1, Bryan Brown2, Satya Sri M3 and Elad
Kivelevitch4 University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio,
45221
[6] Gurjashan Singh Pannu, Mohammad Dawud Ansari,
Pritha Gupta. DesignandImplementationofAutonomous
Car using Raspberry Pi. International Journal of
Computer Applications (0975 – 8887) Volume 113 – No.
9, March 2015.

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