Rover-71 — Four-Board Electrical Architecture

Overview

The complete electrical architecture for an indigenous Mars rover — four custom boards carrying autonomous compute, manipulator control, science instrumentation and high-current drive.

Challenge

Design four custom boards for a Mars rover: main compute (Jetson Orin NX), robotic arm controller (TB6600), science module, and wheel-gear motor driver (BTS7960) — all field-survivable.

Our Approach

• Main control board: NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX + RPi4 + Arduino Mega
• TB6600 stepper drive for robotic arm manipulator
• Dedicated science module board for experiments
• BTS7960 DC drive with opto-isolated inputs for mobility
• Independent power, protection and modularity per subsystem

Technical Highlights

• NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX (16GB) for autonomous navigation
• 4 custom boards — modular and field-replaceable
• 8th globally of 27 teams at ARC'25 Turkey
• 83.83% overall score in University Rover Challenge

Deliverables

• ✓4 custom PCB designs
• ✓System integration documentation
• ✓Field test results
• ✓IEEE TENSYMP 2024 publication