Audi aims for the moon with the Lunar Rover

Last year, Google sponsored a $30 million competition by the X Prize Foundation that called for privately-funded spaceflight teams that can successfully launch a robotic spacecraft that can land and travel across the surface of the Moon while sending back to Earth images and other data. The Audi Lunar Quattro, developed by the German carmaker with a little help from Part Time Scientists, a Berlin-based team of scientists, is Audi’s entry for this competition.

Looking a bit like Wall-E from the Disney-Pixar movie, Audi’s Lunar Quattro features a large 300-square-centimeter solar panel across the top that recharges the LithiumIon batteries. The wheels are electrically driven and can turn through 360 degrees. Its top speed is 3.6 kilometres per hour. But its striking feature is probably the camera unit mounted on the front, which houses a couple of cameras so that it can take 3D images of the moon. 

The moon’s surface has very different conditions compared to the Earth's. The main challenge any lunar rover is to withstand the harsh elements and be able to run through the potholes of the moon's surface. This drives the Lunar Quattro team to optimize Audi's Quattro drivetrain, a technology the company is already using on its cars. With it, the Rover will be able to avoid deadlock situations, such as getting stuck in a pile of lunar sand.

But this is just one of the many technologies they are working on for the Audi Lunar Quattro to do its mission successfully. 3D printing technology also comes into play. In fact, the prototype rover being shown at the Detroit Auto Show was constructed out of 3D printed aluminium and titanium.

The PT Scientists team is one of five teams favoured by Google Lunar XPrize to land a rover on the moon in 2017. One of the five teams is Team Indus from India.