With up to four hours of continuous driving capability and a Wi-Fi range up to 220 yards (200 meters), the Turtle Rover is a highly versatile open platform mobile robot designed to explore caves, water reservoirs, and ruins. Equipped with a remote-controlled robotic arm, the land drone is rugged enough to tackle harsh conditions on Mars even though it’s engineered to explore planet earth.

Intelligent Design (SDK Platform)

“NASA and ESA plan to send another rover to Mars in 2020. SpaceX wants to send one million people to Mars in the next 100 years. However, before anyone sends a rover to another planet, we designed Turtle Rover—a robot to remind you about how beautiful the Earth is.”

With an open source platform, the Turtle Rover is a developer’s dream robot. Whether you want to add custom electronics, enhance the robotic arm’s functionality, or interact with other devices, Turtle’s development platform allows users to modify the software to satisfy one’s imagination. The creators of the revolutionary Turtle Rover ensured its skills were open to a community of developers interested in seeing the potential of a groundbreaking land drone. The open electronics are based on Raspberry Pi open source code.

“We built Turtle Rover as a 100% customizable open platform to make it useful in many different fields.”

Turtle Rover Versatility

For those who just want to have fun exploring different caves with a powerful Rover, you can instantly transform Turtle into a land drone by adding a GoPro/DSLR camera. Controlled by a wireless remote, you can send live streaming HD video of your next underwater cave by simply connecting opening up a web browser on any device (smartphone or PC). The watertight sturdy design allows for Turtle to explore bunkers and tunnels with small passageways.

“Turtle Rover is the world’s first remote-controlled mobile robot capable of working in rough terrain.”

By adding any 360-degree camera alongside an external light source, you have yourself an incredibly powerful land/water navigator mapping environments not reachable by humans. Strong enough to transport equipment and intuitive enough to recognize objects around it, Turtle uses Kinect technology to carry items to its final designation – no matter how challenging the terrain. The strategically placed mounting surface onto of the Rover allows for the seamless carrying of equipment.

The Turtle Rover App

The Turtle App is capable of providing Rover status updates, recording live HD streaming video, is touch screen ready, has an emergency stop button, and works with pretty much any device with a web browser. In other words, this is the operator’s mission control center powered by Wi-Fi connectivity. From RECON missions that carry minerals from the depth of caves to recording live HD video of underwater wrecks, the adventure is entirely up to the Turtle owner. To watch the exploration, just simply open up the app and stay within 220 yards of the Turtle Rover.

Bottom Line

With production ready to start in October (2017) and delivery scheduled for June (2018), the Turtle Rover is poised to revolutionize the way we explore planet earth. Normally restricted to NASA Mars explorations, the Turtle Rover is democratizing the Rover experience to developers and consumers interested in capturing HD-quality video of hidden caves, hard-to-reach water reservoirs, and harsh environments not reachable by humans.
 
 
 
Source: Turtle Rover Kickstarter