Last month the International Space Apps Challenge was held, a NASA’s collaborative program that aims to produce open source solutions to be applied to problems that affect the Earth and space. A project chosen among 500 others is OpenCuriosity, an open source rover inspired by the Curiosity Mars Rover based on Arduino circuit boards.
A group of four people built a small prototype of OpenCuriosity. It uses Arduino Mega as main processor and other processors, for example for its sensors. This type of card is one of the variants of Arduino, a small circuit board designed to quickly create prototypes and circuits of various types. The Arduino layout data are distributed as free hardware and for this reason it’s been having a great success and new variants have been produced since the project started in 2005.
Arduino boards are perfect for open source electronic projects and for this reason were chosen by the OpenCuriosity team. The Arduino Mega boards were used to run the experiments, the collection and transmission of data and of course to control the rover. Parts of the rover were produced with a 3D printer.
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The OpenCuriosity team opened a section on GitHub that contains the hardware and software projects, so that anyone can examine them. If you’re not only interested but also like to develop electronic projects, it’s open source material you can freely use to build your own rover or as a base to build one the way you want.
The idea is to allow anyone to integrate their project into OpenCuriosity to create their own version of the rover. The collected data can be made public on the Internet to share information with the public for educational and scientific purposes. In essence, OpenCuriosity is a project everyone can modify and improve to build a rover with different instruments and different skills.
The conditions on Mars make it difficult to hope that the OpenCuriosity rover can really be used in a mission. The important thing is that people all over the world can have fun in finding solutions to improve the project and some of them might be useful even for new NASA missions.
