{
  "abstract": "Lunar micro-rovers under 50 kg are a rapidly growing vehicle class, yet open, benchmarked tools for running optimization across design trades remain scarce. Rover sizing is a highly coupled problem with a feedback loop specific to surface vehicles: a heavier rover sinks deeper into loose regolith, deeper sinkage costs more power, more power requires a larger array, and the array adds mass. We present RoverDevKit, a tradespace exploration toolkit with an open evaluator that couples a closed-form wheel-soil model with bottom-up mass, solar-power, thermal-survival, and traverse models. It is fast enough to serve as the fitness function of a multi-objective genetic algorithm (NSGA-II): one search of 3000 mission evaluations takes under a minute on a single laptop core. We use it to map the trades among distance traveled, vehicle mass, and slope capability on mare, polar, highland, and crater-rim missions. Across those missions the limiting factor changes: energy storage at high latitude, slope traction on loose highland regolith, and traverse range on mare and crater-rim terrain. The wheel-soil model matches measured single-wheel drawbar pull on two independent datasets to within the 20-30% error typically reported for this class of model, and the mass model predicts published 5-50 kg rover masses to 10.5% median absolute error. A check against five published in-class designs places them near the designs the optimizer selects. Re-running the search after applying that wheel-soil comparison error leaves these conclusions unchanged.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": "2606.21755",
  "author_total": 1,
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "Jon Reifschneider"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/9rph6g241wt67.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.48550/arxiv.2606.21755",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "9rph6g241wt67",
  "issns": [],
  "landing_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.21755",
  "language": null,
  "licence": "LicenseRef-arXiv-nonexclusive-1.0",
  "licence_label": "arXiv licence",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/",
  "metadata_licence": "CC0-1.0",
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "arxiv",
      "astro-ph.IM"
    ],
    [
      "arxiv",
      "cs.RO"
    ],
    [
      "openalex",
      "2205|Soil Mechanics and Vehicle Dynamics"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7165687436",
  "pdf_url": "https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.21755",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-09-15",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/9rph6g241wt67.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T12:22:01Z",
      "native_id": "2606.21755",
      "source": "arxiv",
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.21755"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "astronomy",
      "origin": "arxiv:astro-ph.IM",
      "subfield": "instrumentation-methods"
    }
  ],
  "title": "RoverDevKit: An open, physics-grounded tradespace toolkit for conceptual design of lunar micro-rovers",
  "title_text": "RoverDevKit: An open, physics-grounded tradespace toolkit for conceptual design of lunar micro-rovers",
  "type": "preprint",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-30T12:22:01Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/9rph6g241wt67",
  "venue": "arXiv",
  "versions": []
}