What 279 recorded rides say about how Earth Rovers really move

An open-source GPS checkpoint pilot called Earth Rover Pilot was built by Munim, Inc. for the FrodoBots Earth Rover SDK. The SDK does not specify how positive angular turns, speed of rotation or driving per command, units of gyroscope readings, or GPS latency work. To measure these aspects, the company analyzed 279 recorded rides from the public FrodoBots-2K dataset using a Python script.

Each ride consisted of 12 segments of GPS, control, and IMU data, totaling around 1 million control rows from approximately 317 MB of data.

The pilot found that a positive angular turn steers the rover to the left, with a turn rate of about 30° per second. The gyroscope measures yaw (rotation around the z-axis) in degrees per second, with positive values indicating counter-clockwise rotation. The rover achieves a maximum speed of about 0.8 meters per second, and wheel RPMs are signed.

The pilot discovered that an uncalibrated real rover would turn left at 30° per second, but the calibration only covers about 350°, which is insufficient for a full turn. Therefore, the rover would spin until a whole turn is completed, taking up to 90 seconds. While correcting GPS fixes for the 1.5-second lag did not significantly improve performance in simulated missions, it remains disabled by default.

The study analyzed data from the Earth Rover Zero era (early 2024) and inferred the gyroscope's units from the dataset. The pilot was tested only in a simulator, and the findings and code are shared under the same license as the FrodoBots-2K dataset, which is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. This analysis is not affiliated with FrodoBots or BitRobot.