Make creation easy! Let’s watch the high-value 3D printed lunar rover

Let’s start with showing you guys some pictures~

These pictures above are the model designed and built by Monash Nova Rover, a student team from Monash University. This group of young makers, with their outstanding creativity and execution, have achieved excellent results in global competitions.

Among them, eSUN sponsored 3D printing materials for tires, robotic arms, and some body production, including eTPU-95A, PLA+, etc. for this project.

Nova Rover uses additive manufacturing extensively to rapidly develop prototypes and final designs that require complex solutions. Over the past four years, the Monash Nova Rover team has developed three models of the rover that can be used for competition. According to team members, 3D printing technology has been critical to the success of many of their projects. At the same time, 3D printing materials from eSUN have enabled their 3D printed parts to maintain a consistently high quality, helping to reduce system failure points and simplifying the design process. The variety of performance 3D printing materials allowed their team to change and optimize the capabilities of the rover in many ways.

Lunar rovers belong to robotic technology, and they should have basic functions such as forward, backward, turning, climbing, fetching, sampling, and flipping (turning over after falling). “Light weight, small size, low power consumption” has always been the golden rule of spacecraft design. The lunar rover model, not only meets the needs of “miniaturization and lightweight”, also needs to withstand the toss of “falling, hitting, rolling, and climbing”, and requires firmness and durability.

eTPU-95A is one of eSUN’s star products. The elongation at break of this product is ≥800%, high toughness, high impact resistance, at the same time, good flexibility, excellent tear resistance, wear resistance, cut resistance, low long-term compression set rate.

For more performance parameters, please refer to the following figure:

eTPU-95A also has the characteristics of good weather resistance, strong UV resistance, oil resistance, low-temperature resistance, and aging resistance, which are suitable for various outdoor scene applications.

eTPU-95A product introduction video:

The use of eTPU-95A to print lunar rover tires can better meet the Nova Rover team’s demand for the “strong, lightweight” performance of the lunar rover.

Roaming Mars and exploring the future, the addition of 3D printing technology has made the design and manufacture of the lunar rover more intelligent and flexible, and the efficiency of debugging and testing has also been improved to a certain extent, which will help shorten the development time and improve the success rate of the work.

With the continuous development of 3D printing technology, its application in various industries is also increasing. eSUN 3D printing materials are willing to support the dream of global makers. Teams that are exploring and creating are welcome to contact us. eSUN is willing to witness the birth of more excellent applications with you!