RoverDevKit: An open, physics-grounded tradespace toolkit for conceptual design of lunar micro-rovers

Abstract:Lunar micro-rovers under 50 kg are a rapidly growing vehicle class, yet open, benchmarked tools for running optimization across design trades remain scarce. Rover sizing is a highly coupled problem with a feedback loop specific to surface vehicles: a heavier rover sinks deeper into loose regolith, deeper sinkage costs more power, more power requires a larger array, and the array adds mass. We present RoverDevKit, a tradespace exploration toolkit with an open evaluator that couples a closed-form wheel-soil model with bottom-up mass, solar-power, thermal-survival, and traverse models. It is fast enough to serve as the fitness function of a multi-objective genetic algorithm (NSGA-II): one search of 3000 mission evaluations takes under a minute on a single laptop core. We use it to map the trades among distance traveled, vehicle mass, and slope capability on mare, polar, highland, and crater-rim missions. Across those missions the limiting factor changes: energy storage at high latitude, slope traction on loose highland regolith, and traverse range on mare and crater-rim terrain. The wheel-soil model matches measured single-wheel drawbar pull on two independent datasets to within the 20-30% error typically reported for this class of model, and the mass model predicts published 5-50 kg rover masses to 10.5% median absolute error. A check against five published in-class designs places them near the designs the optimizer selects. Re-running the search after applying that wheel-soil comparison error leaves these conclusions unchanged.

Robotics (cs.RO); Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)

arXiv:2606.21755 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2606.21755v2 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.21755 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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