Tires on the ground ...

Mark,

Probably no single design is going to solve all problems, so several models will be desireable.

My primary focus is on rent-able sight seeing rovers. Most rovers should be simple camera platforms, plus a few very simple and very cheap sensors. Microphones, thermometers, barometers, etc.

But there is no reason to ignore other, more technical, purposes for some portion of the fleet. Some of these alternate designs could become very important if a sightseer finds something that needs a more detailed examination than a camera can provide.

Here's the rover on Mars. It still needs to be scruffed up a bit and I've no idea of the scale of the rocks to the rover. Are you sure you want to lose those wheels? I think that if the rover climbs up a rock, then the track could twist and slip off.



A sudden idea here. For the bucky ball I had to add little pipes to each node point. That got me thinking about a road builders' design tool. They make a contour model and place pins where towns are. Then they add a perspex copy of the contours, and place that onto the pins. After that they add a bubble mixture which creates bubble strips of the most economical road routes.

I think something like that applied to Mars might give us some clues as to where artifacts might be. Lay in a grid, study it, then place new pins at likely points and remove others.

I assume there's a computer program that does this now, So we could take a dem map of someplace on Earth, make a bubble grid and see how well it ties in with where towns and cities are. It should. I think it would also show where major earth cuts might have been made.

(Edited) I looked for software that can do this routing by bubbles but couldn't find anything that claimed to do it. So I did a search for the problem itself and found a Dr. Cyril Isenberg at Kent Univ. u.k. I sent him an e mail asking if he knew of any programs, or failing that, how to build the real contour model. I didn't mention that I wanted to try it for Mars [] Just in case he thought I was off my little red waggon[8D]

<b>[Stoat] "I think that if the rover climbs up a rock, then the track could twist and slip off."</b>

Perhaps this is why NASA/JPL chose to use a trackless design?

When you are in a maintenance-is-not-an-option situation, reliability most likely trumps ultimate traction. Keep it simple.

I don't think detracking is going to be too big a problem due to the fact that the top speed is slow. The only real change to the 3d rendering that I notice is that I really would favor the center module to be mounted higher in the triangle that makes the tracks, that is the reason for the third top drive wheel in the first place. Let me know what you think fellas.

mark

I got a reply from that guy Cyril Isenberg. he says he doesn't know of any program that lays in bubble film tracks in three dimensions. He did recommend a book, which has a couple of chapters on the subject, Courant and Robbins entitled 'What is Mathematics'. Anybody got a copy?

Let's say we have four towns that need to be connected by roads. Join the dots to make a rectangle [] No, the bubble film takes the least route and you get five roads [8D]

Split the towns into groups of two and take the distance between a pair as the loci of an ellipse, then draw two lines from the loci to meet at a point on the circumference. Draw a tangent to that point. The other two towns do the same, so that the tangent is parallel to the first one.Then draw a line between them.

The upshot is that we have a pair of triangles, apex to apex, with a line joining them.

Now, suppose we took a Digital Elevation Map (DEM) of the British Isles, and got two of these printed off on a 3d printer. One of them will have to be transparent but I don't think this is a problem. We drill it and place pins through where Roman towns were. Put our bubble mix in and see if it looks like the Roman road system. Then we could place Anglo Saxon towns on and look for nodes that suggest where there might have been towns or hamlets.

We could do the same for Mars. I would like to see a program to do it though, as we could alter the virtual bubble paths on the fly, to allow for geo political factors. A route might be the most economical but it might be shifted over because the neighbours are unfriendly or geology problems. Another point would be that we could lay in a grid and see if we get certain patterns that could be fine tuned. A match with a few glassy tubes, where the point nodes are many and far apart, would be a good indicator of them being artifacts but I would like to avaoid any possibilites of it being argued that the nodes were placed to produce that effect. Personally I don't think it could be fiddled.

I honestly think we should do this. As a computer program it would have real commercial value here on earth as well.

On the rover, I can raise the central body but it won't be able to topple over and work. We do have a very small peizoelectric gyro in there though, instruct it to stop the motors if the tread starts to climb a too large rock, wait for orders from Earth. If none arrive, reverse, turn slightly and carry on past the rock.

On the wheeled rover, how's about its "tyre" being a spring bent round in a circle? Strong, springy and it would have good thermal properties.

Stoat,

You should start a new thread for the program idea.