An Integrated Toolchain for Designing Commercial Lunar Rovers

Sammanfattning: As commercial lunar rovers are being developed and planned to fly from next year, in the context of a global momentum for lunar exploration, the mindset of system design is shifting to a product-oriented approach (as opposed to traditionally single mission-designed system). This deeply affects the system engineering discipline, which is also evolving through the development of more integrated, model-centric methodologies such as Model-Based System Engineering (MBSE). This Master Thesis combines 2 research questions:- How to adapt systems engineering processes and tools to a commercially-driven / product-oriented approach?- How to leverage new developments (e.g MBSE) within the system engineering discipline to support the rover design transition to a product-oriented philosophy? These research questions are investigated through this Master Thesis, carried out as a 6-month internship at ispace Europe (Luxembourg), a global lunar exploration company developing landers, rovers and data tools. The Master Thesis is applied to ispace’s Exploration Rover currently under development within the Polar Ice Explorer (PIE) mission with support from the Luxembourg Government.The goal of this Master Thesis is to develop an integrated toolchain (set of tools) for efficiently designing rover products (Exploration Rover), including platform configuration for a given mission concept and set of payloads, system sizing and mission analysis. The chosen methodology can be summarized as:1. Adapting PIE models to a generic, parametric/configurable toolset that can be used for mission/platform analysis and optimization2. Defining the Exploration Rover toolchain requirements & architecture, and selecting its environment (trade-off including MBSE solutions)3. Building the Exploration Rover toolchain, integrating models inside the defined architecture By maturing existing models, leveraging new software functionalities (in this case Valispace) and MBSE practises along with adding new parametric models for quick feasibility studies and integrating all models together, it was successfully shown that this integrated toolchain can support rover products definition, performing frequent and insightful design iterations, analysis and trade-offs. Not only does the toolchain comply with the product-approach but also successfully supports the Polar Ice Explorer (PIE) mission, by directly contributing to the system engineering activities and models of the Phase B. Therefore, the Master Thesis proved to be a successful demonstrator for developing more product-driven rovers, by leveraging new practices within the system engineering discipline.