Mission Hubris

The Wairarapa is not Mars. That has not stopped us from wishing it was.

The mission

Hubris is WASA’s first Mars exploration rover mission. We will deploy a rover into a rural New Zealand paddock and ask it to drive, navigate, observe, and communicate from the red frontier.

The terrain is expected to include loose soil, rocks, steep inclines, livestock, and at least one locked gate. Mission control will be somewhere with a reliable source of coffee.

The current state of the rover

In the finest number 8 wire tradition, the rover is half built and only one quarter designed. The hardware will evolve as the mission teaches us what it needs.

The software is built using Elixir with Beambots, an open source robotics framework, and Nerves, the embedded framework for the Elixir ecosystem.

Mission focus

Hubris is primarily about making a rover that can make sensible decisions on its own:

• Autonomous driving across uneven terrain.
• Navigation and position awareness.
• Obstacle detection and avoidance.

Mission objectives

• Demonstrate autonomous rover navigation in our Mars simulator environment AKA paddock.
• Capture evidence of the local geology, weather, and suspiciously large farm machinery.
• Establish reliable communications between the rover and mission control.
• Return safely before anyone asks whether we have permission.

Current status

In development. The rover is half built, the software stack is taking shape, and the remaining design decisions will be made in the field—or as close to the field as mission control can tolerate.

Follow the mission in the Hubris project repository.