By Dave Abrahams
Ingolstadt, Germany -
Audi's latest autonomous vehicle will be operating way, way off-road - 380 000km from the nearest tarmac, in fact.
The company has thrown the weight of its not inconsiderable experience in autonomous driving, as well as electric vehicles, behind the German-based Part-Time Scientists' entry in the Google Lunar XPrize competition to land an unmanned rover on the moon.
The competition is an incentive to engineers and entrepreneurs from around the world to develop low-cost methods of robotic space exploration. To win the $30 million (R364 million) prize, a privately funded team must successfully place a robot on the moon's surface that explores at least 500 metres and transmits high-definition video and images back to Earth.
Audi is helping the team with testing in the Austrian Alps and on Tenerife in the Canary Islands (the closest approximation on earth to a lunar landscape) and the Audi concept design studio in Munich is revising the design - now officially called the Audi lunar quattro - to make it as light as possible without sacrificing durability. After all, it will be operating a long way away from the nearest Audi dealership.
MILESTONES
The lunar quattro is mostly made of aluminium, with an adjustable solar panel that follows the sun to capture its energy and direct it to a lithium-ion battery, which feeds four electric wheel-hub motors. Theoretical top speed is 3.6km/h, but once again, Audi and the Part-Timers are more worried about its off-road capability and navigation ability.
Two stereo cameras (for 3D images) and a scientific camera to examine materials found on the lunar surface are mounted on the front of the chassis.
The lunar quattro has already won two Milestone prizes, awarded during earlier rounds of the competition by a jury of aerospace experts and it is among the 15 entries - out of an original 25 - from Brazil, Canada, Chile, Hungary, Japan, Israel, Italy, Malaysia and the United States that have made it through to the finals.
The lunar lander containing the quattro is scheduled to be launched on the five-day, 380 000km trip to the moon in 2017; the target landing area is north of the moon's equator, near the 1972 landing site of the Apollo 17, NASA's last manned mission to the moon.