This book discusses the next generation of robot explorers for the surface of the Earth, our Moon and Mars. Up to this point, surface exploration has used one or two car-sized vehicles, operating on their own, or perhaps just a drone. Mars exploration has involved one or two rovers covering a small area around a landing site.
A paradigm ship in spacecraft architecture has been the Cubesat approach, a standardized, open source design. Cubesats have become more capable. The standardization of the hardware and software for Cubesats have made construction, testing, and operations easier and less expensive.
The CubeRover concept came out of Carnegie-Mellon University's
Robotics Group headed by the famed Red Whittaker, who lead the CMU team to win the DARPA Challenge. A second company, Astrobotics, was spun off to address NASA's challenge.
