After all important ordered parts arrived we started to implement the first iteration of our robot.
This includes soldering our own system board, as you can see here.

Mehmed working on the electronics ( click to enlarge )

Good evening everyone,

the Critical Design Review has been completed successfully; however, before we talk on the further proceedings, we would like to share a few impressions of the CDR meeting and our days in the Netherlands.

First off, we would like to thank everyone from ESA for the invitation to the ESTEC facility and the great organization of the whole event. We experienced a great time in Noordwijk and really enjoyed our stay there!

The CDR meeting was opened by a short welcome by Mr. Visentin from ESA and an introduction of each present team, followed by a few very interesting presentations by ESA staff members, which gave an insight on the latest moon missions, placing the Lunar Robotics Challenge in an overall context with future missions to the moon.

After lunch, the teams presentations on their respective concepts began, starting with our own team. First, Jacob Schwendner started to explain the robots overall concept, hereafter giving details on the planned locomotion system, before he then handed over to Thilo Kaupisch who finished the presentation by giving details on the electronics and our planned software system. The whole presentation was concluded by showing some of our experiment results and one small video clip of testing our first CESAR prototype.

Afterwards, a discussion time of 15 minutes was granted to the audience in order to ask questions or give other comments and critics on the concept. All in all, our proposal has been approved with only minor changes, which are currently being adressed by our crew.

The rest of the day and the first half of thursday were filled with the other teams presentations, who all showed great and impressive concepts - we are anxious to see all of them in action at the challenge site in october! The whole meeting was topped off with a very exciting tour through the ESTECs testing facilities, which gave us an interesting insight in the final testing procedures of modern satelites and other space vehicles.

All in all, the meeting was a great event and we would like to thank the other teams for their comments and critics. At the CDR, we found very different, yet very interesting approaches on the given task and would therefore like to wish all the other teams the best of luck for their construction phase. We're definately keen on seeing their systems in the final challenge!

To conclude this post, we would like to share some of our testing footage with you all! Enjoy!

Good evening,

it is the week before the CDR, and a lot of work still to be done. The meeting schedule was tightened to almost daily full crew meetings in order to finalize the conceptual preparation work which has gotten to a pretty detailed level during the past week. The crew is split up into different smaller task groups where each is adressed to different parts of the CESAR robot.

Based on the locomotion testing results we have to redesign the back part of the robot in order to improve mobility on sand terrain as well as on sloping ground. Therefore, it was decided to design the back part of the robot as a separate module in order to maintain easy exchangeability.

Also, the first calculations on the manipulator arm have been made; additionally our crew is currently working out the details on the manipulator arms suspension and the corresponding camera system. We also have begun to develop the RCU ( Remote Control Unit ) for the CESAR.

We also finally made it to update the project blog, so check out the newly added sections describing the overall project task and our robots concept.

Stay tuned for further updates!