Robohub Podcast: LunaRoo, with Jürgen Leitner

Another great podcast from the team at Robohub. See more by them here.

In this episode, Ron Vanderkley interviews Jürgen “Juxi” Leitner, a researcher at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Robots Vision in the Queensland University of Technology in Australia. Leitner speaks about a system being developed for the Google Lunar XPrize, called LunaRoo.

The Google Lunar challenge calls for privately funded spaceflight teams to land a robotic spacecraft on the Moon, travel 500 meters, and transmit back high-definition video and images. LunaRoo is a hopping robot designed to leap up to 20 meters in the Moon’s lower gravity. While in the air (well, not really), LunaRoo will use computer vision to track the movement of a rover, that is trying to drive 500 meters, navigate the Moon’s surface.

Here’s a video showing some prototypes of LunaRoo.

Jürgen “Juxi“ Leitner is a researcher at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Robotic Vision. Before coming to Australia, he worked and studied at various research institutes in Europe and Japan. From 2010-2014, he worked in a robotics lab at the Dalle Molle Institute for AI (IDSIA) in Lugano, Switzerland. Prior to IDSIA, he worked at the European Space Agency‘s Advanced Concepts Team for a year.

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