Our world tour of fellow 3D-printed fan rovers started in Sweden with Jakob Kranz’s Mars Rover project. The next stop is France, or at least, a French-speaking nation: Reproduction du Rover Mars 2020 by Frédéric Jelmoni. (Thanks to Quinn Morley for passing this one along.) This project is still working up to the first complete iteration, and Jelmoni wants to finish V1 before publishing details so we have to be satisfied with glimpses on the web site and YouTube videos.

Similar to what I did with Sawppy, Jelmoni took orthographic views of Perseverance rover into Autodesk Fusion 360 and dimensioned a layout to scale. This ensures the rover has correct proportions. Looking at the screen shot of his layout, it looks like his wheels have a diameter of 125mm. This is slightly larger than Sawppy’s 120mm but in practice our rovers should be effectively identical in size.

While the body of this rover is built out of aluminum extrusion beams like Sawppy, the suspension arms are built from metal tubes instead. Based on color, my guess is aluminum. This gives an appearance more faithful to the original. The focus on visual fidelity is a consistent theme throughout this project. My Sawppy project gave up a lot of visual fidelity in favor of 3D printing practicality, so our two rover projects reflect different priorities.

A good example are the wheels. These are absolutely gorgeous! The wheel spokes replicate the inner curvature of each spoke, skipping the outer curvature visible in the online 3D model. They look great but I worry about their strength which was why I forfeited fidelity for my own rover wheel design. The 3D printer settings needs to be very well dialed in for optimal layer adhesion, otherwise these spokes are liable to fracture along layer lines. Aussie Sawppy explored a similar idea and the spokes fractured exactly in the way I feared they might. TeamSG blamed it on cheap PLA so I’d be curious if they’ll retry with different filament. Similarly, I’ll be curious to see how this design works out for Jelmoni. Especially if there will be any results from stress testing these wheels.

I loved seeing the rocker-bogie differential design used here. I don’t think the main differential body is 3D-printed. It almost looks like MDF (painted black) but I’m not confident on that guess. Many of the linkage pieces are 3D printed, the most illuminating part being the eye bolt used as the differential bar hinge. This is a good way to handle the multi-axis loads, but I find it curious that it is only used on one side of the link and the rocker side has only a single degree of freedom hinge. Perhaps multiple degrees of freedom movement is not as necessary as I thought it might be.

I’m also curious what material is being used for this rover’s flat body sides. These flat textured panels appear to be commodity items and not 3D printed. Which is great because the power of 3D printing is largely wasted printing large flat sheets. They are best at building unique shapes tailored to an application at hand. A focus on that uniqueness to create a clean minimalist design leads to the Bricolabs rovers.

Since the time I’ve published my Sawppy rover project, I’ve learned of a few other rover projects with no relation to Sawppy (other than being inspired by the same rovers on Mars) but also utilize 3D printing. These are far more affordable than trying to duplicate the mechanical workings of a rover in LEGO. This collection also happens to hail from around the world. The first stop of this world tour is Sweden, home of a rover published by Jakob Krantz titled simply “Mars Rover”. It uses commodity PVC pipes for suspension structural members instead of the aluminum extrusion beams I used on Sawppy. The overall size is slightly larger than Sawppy, with different proportions. For example, the wheels and body appear to be smaller than proportional to Curiosity. But it is recognizably and undeniably inspired by NASA JPL Mars Rovers.

Full rocker-bogie is presented and accounted for, including 3D-printed links for the differential. Sawppy didn’t use 3D printing for these parts, it used the same hardware used on the JPL Open Source Rover. They are adjustable suspension link turnbuckles from the remote control car world, and I have yet to think up or find a 3D printed design that worked as well as those turnbuckles. It’s not clear how Krantz’s design handles rotation across multiple degrees of freedom and browsing the published CAD file only shows gaps where some critical components of the joint (bearings? bushings?) would sit. How these differential links function remains a mystery to me for now.

The published parts list included several bearings, all of which appeared to be used in the rocker-bogie suspension. Examining its CAD file confirmed that all wheel forces are sitting directly against the drive motor gearbox, and all corner wheel forces are directed into the steering servos. I prefer to have ball bearings handling such forces instead of the motor gearboxes directly, and designed Sawppy to use a pair of 608 ball bearings at each rotational joint. Perhaps overkill, but it’s what I like to have.

On the electronics side, Krantz’s rover uses ESP32 for its brains. As a powerful and affordable microcontroller with wireless capability, it is a very good choice for robotics projects. Especially since it is now one of the supported Micro-ROS architectures for interfacing with ROS2. I haven’t seen any interest from Krantz about putting ROS2 on his rover, but the option is there if he wants to.

And there’s plenty of time for future work. Like Sawppy, this rover is a long-term project of Jakob Krantz who has been working on his rover for at least a year. Or at least, there were two Hackaday writeups for his project a year apart. It is a labor of love and I know that well. It’s a journey that Frédéric Jelmoni has recently embarked on for a younger rover project focused on Perseverance.

After seeing circuit boards being used as structural members in the 4tronix M.A.R.S. rover, I realized that I had forgotten a very fertile field: LEGO! My interest in mechanical systems today is something I give full credit to the LEGO sets I had growing up. My LEGO creations grew more complex as I grew older, limited only by my toy budget. However, once I got up and running on 3D printing objects of my imaginations, I haven’t touched my big box of LEGO since. I quite enjoy the freedom of not being constrained by what LEGO pieces are available.

Among currently available LEGO sets, there is a tiny little Mars rover as part of the LEGO CITY Mars Research Shuttle (60226). The set is quite affordable, but about the only thing its little rover has resembling Curiosity rover are the number of wheels. Beyond that, there is no rocker-bogie and no corner steering, which is not a surprise at this price point.

Moving up the price and complexity scale is the LEGO NASA Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover (21104), released in 2014 and no longer in production. This was part of the LEGO Ideas program where people can submit their LEGO designs and, if enough other LEGO fans voted in favor, the LEGO group will consider adapting it for production. This particular idea received over 10,000 supporting votes and became an official product. Perusing its assembly instruction PDF, I was surprised to find that this rover has a fully articulating rocker-bogie suspension. Very impressive! I also sadly learned that it required several pieces that I lack in my own LEGO collection, so I couldn’t “just” follow the directions to build one of my own. At some point I could go hunt for the few missing pieces which should be cheaper than buying this out-of-production kit on eBay. People are asking over $100 for a used kit and as much as $1,100 for a never-opened box. That’s more than two Sawppy rovers!

But if price is no object, I can look to other LEGO creations people have posted. There are quite a few “LEGO rover” projects online, and it follows roughly the same trajectory as the past few window shopping posts: most don’t even have six wheels, some have six wheel rocker-bogie but no corner steering, etc.

An example of a rover with corner steering is this LEGO MINDSTORM NXT creation. Despite being constrained by the selection of available LEGO pieces, it nevertheless replicated some features that I skipped with my 3D-printed rover. One example being the spokes in each of the six wheels, which I had simplified for 3D printing but the builder here faithfully represented more of the curves. And they have a robot arm, which my Sawppy is still waiting for. But according to the text, only the four corner wheels drive leaving the middle wheels free-wheeling. And it’s not obvious if the rocker-bogie articulates faithfully. At the very minimum, this design is missing the differential bar across the top.

This rover looks to be roughly the same size as my Sawppy rover, but the price tag would be significantly higher. There are six visible NXT brains on this invention: five on board the rover and one for the handheld remote. Each $350 MINDSTORM NXT box comes with a single NXT brain, so this rover costs at a minimum 6 * $350 = $2,100 dollars. Yikes.

So as far as LEGO rovers go, the best ones that implement features I consider important are build-it-yourself designs by enthusiasts and not available as commercial products. Thus we return to the world of 3D printing, where Sawppy isn’t the only rover design floating around.

Wheeled robot kits calling themselves rovers are plentiful, but rarely do they faithfully represent the JPL rovers sent to Mars. ServoCity’s Bogie Runt Rover at least is a six-wheel chassis with rocker-bogie suspension, but is missing the corner wheel steering system. Looking for commercially available products out there with six wheel drive rocker-bogie and four corner steering, I was almost ready to conclude none existed until I came across the 4tronix M.A.R.S Rover Robot.

The name is an acronym for Mobile Autonomous Robotic System and the autonomy comes from the brainpower of either a Raspberry Pi Zero or BBC micro:bit. Out of all the commercial products I’ve come across, M.A.R.S. has the most mechanically faithful model of Curiosity and Perseverance suspension geometry. It has roughly similar proportions, and uses a differential arm over the body. Sojourner, Spirit, and Opportunity use a differential inside the body in order to maximize top surface area for solar panels. The nuclear-powered Curiosity and Perseverance didn’t have such constraint. By moving the differential above, they gained body interior volume.

Perusing the assembly instructions I see the structural components are all printed circuit boards (PCB) which is not usually considered structural material but apparently can be made to work at this scale. Six wheel drive comes from N20 micro gear motors, and four wheel steering comes from MG90S metal gear micro servos. Both of these are fairly widely available for maker projects and good choices.

My quibble with the M.A.R.S. rover are with its rotational motion joints. First up are the rocker-bogie suspension components, each of the joints are a M3 screw inside a PCB hole. I’m queasy about using fasteners as axles, since their threads are not really designed to carry a load. There are no bearings on these joints and the screws have to be tightened precisely. Too tight, and the joints would bind. Too loose, and the rover will wobble. This seems awfully finicky and would loosen as the rover travels.

Second, each wheel’s weight is transferred directly into the N20 micro gearbox. Examining pictures of these gearboxes online, it does not appear the gearbox is designed to handle loads perpendicular to rotational axis. Perhaps the rover is lightweight enough the load would be fine, but all I see are metal shafts turning inside holes in brass plate.

And third, each of the corner steering wheel assemblies are attached directly to the steering micro servo’s horn. Despite the metal gears, MG90S type servos still has a great deal of flexibility and play in its gearbox in the face of loads perpendicular to rotational axis. We can see each corner steering assembly wobbling noticeably while in motion:

New product !: M.A.R.S. Rover for @microbit_edu available in very limited quantities from next week. Pre-order now https://t.co/rgIlXV8PYw pic.twitter.com/ilj3psx2ag

— 4tronix (@4tronix_uk) November 20, 2019

(I also smiled when I realized this video cuts out right when the rover starts tackling a very challenging vertical climb. We’ll never know if it managed the climb.)

The final quibble I have with this design is that the steering axis is not aligned with the wheel. In less formal terms, it means the wheel is sideways offset from its corresponding steering servo instead of sitting directly under the servo. As a result, when the steering servo rotates, its wheel isn’t pivoting about a point. Instead, it is dragged through an arc. This adds a great deal of mechanical stress to the steering mechanism. It also makes the desired wheel velocity harder to calculate through a turn, but it appears the M.A.R.S. software skips that detail. All left side wheels are commanded to turn at the same rate, and all right side wheels are the same with each other. As a result we can see a bit of wheel skid through a turn, reintroducing some of the problems of using a strictly skid steer system as the Bogie Runt Rover did.

In conclusion M.A.R.S. has the mechanical sophistication of corner steering in addition to a good representation of rocker-bogie suspension, but its current iteration does not yet take full advantage. Still, it looks like a nifty little kit and the price of one hundred pounds is significantly lower than the cost of parts for Sawppy.

This concludes my quick tour of commercially available rover kits. But before I move on to DIY rovers, there’s a rover category that bridges across both “commercial product” and “do it yourself”: LEGO rovers.

The littleBits Space Rover is a cute little thing, but with only two wheels it bears little resemblance to real life Martian robot explorers. Moving a little bit higher on the fidelity scale, there are some robots out there with six wheels arranged in a rocker-bogie geometry. A representative of this breed is the ServoCity Bogie Runt rover.

Browsing the ServoCity web site, it appears that the Bogie Runt is the largest and most complex (so far?) of their line of “Runt Rover” chassis kits. Peewee, Sprout, and Zip Runt Rovers are two-wheel differential drive chassis like the littleBits Space Rover. Then there are the Junior, Half-Pint, and Whippersnapper Runt Rovers which roll on four wheels. The Bogie Runt is the only one with six wheels, and the only one with an articulating suspension system.

On ServoCity’s “Robot Chassis Kits” page they are all listed under “Smooth Surface.” This is certainly true for all the other Runt Rovers, but the Bogie Runt should be able to handle rougher terrain thanks to the rocker-bogie suspension system. It’s not obvious if the smooth surface classification for Bogie Runt was a mistake, or if it was deliberate based on information not immediately visible from just window shopping.

All of the Runt Rover kits appear to be made by laser (or possibly waterjet) cutting of flat materials, likely some type of plastic. They have bolt patterns to connect with ServoCity’s Actobotics build system which is mostly aluminum. Actobotics is very popular with FIRST Robotics participants and because of that, it was also the build system selected for the JPL Open Source Rover.

But that also causes a problem I have with the Bogie Runt: Actobotics is based on Inch dimensions and thus problematic for use outside of the United States. Sawppy is metric and, for worldwide compatibility, I plan to keep all derivatives and descendants metric.

Another shortfall of Bogie Runt is the lack of corner steering mechanisms. It is thus constrained to differential drive (a.k.a. “Tank Steer”) which works very well for two wheels but precision drops as the number of contact patches go up. In my experience, differential drive is marginal for four wheels, and behaves unpredictably with six. It was a tradeoff the Bogie Runt Rover product made against cost and complexity, leaving room for improvement and motivation for me to keep looking.

Before I start getting too ambitious with making my personal rover project more like a user-friendly commercial product, I should look around to see if a product already existed. There are a lot of robot kits out there trying to earn that STEM education money, and some of them do try to get a slice of the excitement around our interplanetary robotic explorers. And while some of them are interesting and have their own merits, most of them lack features that I consider critical in a rover relative.

A representative example is the Space Rover Inventor Kit from littleBits. I like the idea of littleBits, giving beginners a very friendly way to explore electronics by making components with magnetic connectors. This makes electrical connections easy and also helps avoid beginner mistakes like accidentally reversing electrical polarity. The downside is that the customer has to pay a premium for this capability, and it’s not a premium that I’ve been personally willing to pay. This particular kit has a MSRP of $200 USD, and for that kind of money I would much rather build my own robot. (Though at time of this posting, the kit is on sale for $30.)

As a supplement to generic electronics beginner kits, littleBits also apply their technology to some themed offerings like this Space Rover kit. All the electrical components are reusable and remixable littleBits centered around a robot control module. The module is interesting because it interacts with a phone app, giving the rover remote control capabilities. But I also see the app as a disadvantage: as I understand it, the app would discourage experimentation. If the user changes the rover around, it wouldn’t take much before it exceeds what the phone app can gracefully handle. Thus motivating the user to leave it in the space rover configuration, defeating the point of using littleBits to begin with.

But in my eyes the biggest shortfall of this rover is its two-wheeled differential drive chassis. Similar to what home robot vacuums like Roomba uses. This is fine for flat indoor ground, which is what earthbound rovers mostly end up doing anyway. So as a home education toy this is a good technical choice. But for fans of rocker-bogie like myself, this is sorely lacking and we must look elsewhere.

But at least this little Space Rover has an arm. Looks like it only has one degree of freedom, which is very limiting, but that’s one more degree of freedom than Sawppy’s nonexistent robot arm. Victory: littleBits Space Rover!