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NASA's Two-Seater Modular Robotic Vehicle (MRV) Ideal for Urban Environments

The Modular Robotic Vehicle, or MRV, was developed at NASA's Johnson Space Center in order to advance technologies that have applications for future vehicles both in space and on Earth. With seating for two people, MRV is a fully electric vehicle well-suited for busy urban environments. Just as NASA helped pioneer fly-by-wire technology in aircraft in the 1970s, MRV is an attempt to bring that technology to the ground in modern automobiles. With no mechanical linkages to the propulsion, steering, or brake actuators, the driver of an MRV relies completely on control inputs being converted to electrical signals and then transmitted by wires to the vehicle's motors. A turn of the steering wheel, for example, is recorded by sensors and sent to computers at the rear of the vehicle. These computers interpret that signal and instruct motors at one or all four of the wheels to move at the appropriate rate, causing the vehicle to turn as commanded. Due to a force feedback system in the steering wheel, the driver feels the same resistance and sensations as a typical automobile. MRV is driven by four independent wheel modules called e-corners. Each e-corner consists of a redundant steering actuator, a passive trailing arm suspension, an in-wheel propulsion motor, and a motor-driven friction braking system.

Topics:
Automation Automotive Motion Control Motors & Drives Robotics Transportation

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 ::music:: I'm Justin Ridley. I'm a robotics engineer at NASA Johnson Space Center. The is MRV, it's the Modular Robotic Vehicle. It's an all-electric vehicle built here at JSC to learn new technologies we can apply for future manned Rovers for the Moon and Mars. The concept is a city car, so it's built like a smart car size, two person, that's all electric. Top speed, the propulsion motors will get it up to about 40 to 50 miles an hour and it uses what we call by wire technologies, so there's no mechanical linkages say between the steering wheel and the wheels of the car, the propulsion, or the brake pedal. It's all sensors in the steering wheel and pedal units that tells the computer in the back

    00:01:02 how to manipulate electric motors throughout the vehicle. So, that force feedback is in the steering wheel. We also have the pedals are specially designed to feel as much like a real car as possible. Each wheel module is modular, that's why it's called the Modular Robotic Vehicle. That allows the vehicle to drive sideways, diagonal, and spin on its center axis, which makes it a pretty unique and highly maneuverable in a parking lot or traffic. Each of those wheel modules consists of a propulsion motor inside each of the wheels, so it's a hub motor in the in the wheel itself. There's a brake motor to the side of that and then above that there's a redundant steering motor that controls the steering about plus or minus a hundred and eighty degrees. So, there's a

    00:01:38 cooling system in the vehicle that is basic pumping fluid through all the avionics. So that cooling system is something that we can apply to future vehicles. So, you can drive MRV just like a regular car. So, two wheel front steering, just use the steering wheel, and it feels just like you would the car you drive everyday. I can put in some different driving modes, one which is called omnidirectional, and in that case I use the steering wheel to help me control the vehicle. So, I can combine these two inputs, the steering wheel and the joystick, to get what we call kind of call it drifting motion. To where it looks like you're... I describe it as driving on ice, but you've got full control. The vehicle can you drift sideways and do some of the more unique motions that

    00:02:13 you would see in a traditional automobile. So, we wanted to develop a system that we call fail operational, where one of those things can fail; a wire fails, or computer fails, and there's a redundant system that immediately takes over control and is made it safely move the vehicle off the road to a safe spot. I mean that's something we'll want to have for the Moon or Mars. When you're on Mars driving around and you have a failure, you need to have redundant systems that can take over control and all the astronauts to safely get back to their habitat or wherever they need to go. The goal of it was to develop the technologies and learn. There's a lot of different maybe applications that some of this could be applied to with

    00:02:48 different partners that NASA could work with. This NASA technology and many others are ready to be transferred to your business. Find out more by visiting technology.nasa.gov