Moon — Step 03 · Photo: Unsplash
Mars — Step 04 · Photo: Unsplash
Open-source rovers from your backyard to the surface of Mars.
Built in public, available to all.
(just between us, don't tell anyone — with a nod to a certain other master plan)
Build an open-source, AI-orchestrated rover on ESP32-S3 that anyone can assemble, program, and deploy at home. Self-balancing, vision-enabled, cryptographically secured. Cost: under $150.
Harden the platform for desert terrain. Autonomous navigation across miles of uncharted earth. Long-range comms, solar power, fleet coordination. Proving ground for what comes next.
Adapt the open-source stack for lunar surface operations. Radiation-hardened firmware, regolith-ready chassis, Earth-to-Moon command pipeline. The ultimate field test.
Open-source everything so everyone can have their rover on Mars. Not one $2.7B rover for NASA — a thousand $2,700 rovers for humanity.
A full-stack open-source infrastructure for autonomous robot fleets — from on-chip cryptography to on-chain identity.
On-chain discovery and identity protocol for robots. Each rover gets a verifiable, decentralized identity anchored to hardware via ATECC608B secure elements.
→ yakrover-protocolsFastAPI + Model Context Protocol gateway. LLMs can discover, command, and query rovers through natural language. Per-robot isolated instances.
→ yakrover-8004-mcpDecentralized marketplace for robot tasks. Post a job, rovers bid, work gets verified on-chain with zero-knowledge proofs of sensor data integrity.
→ yakrover-marketplaceKZG polynomial commitments for batch sensor attestation. Bulletproof range proofs on secp256k1. Provably honest rovers without revealing raw telemetry.
→ yakrover-zkBitkey-inspired multi-sig fleet management using Safe{Wallet}. No single point of failure. Operator + Hardware + Recovery key architecture.
→ yakrover-fleet-2of3Self-balancing differential-drive robot. SimpleFOC motor control, MPC trajectory planning, RT-2 vision-language model oracle. The physical layer.
→ yakrobot.bidRovers communicating across the planet. Five nodes, one decentralized fleet.
Target: Autonomous surface operations · Photo: Unsplash
A distributed study group building open-source robotics infrastructure. Part of the Yak Collective.
Earth proving grounds — Mojave · Photo: Unsplash
Space rovers cost billions and are controlled by a handful of institutions. The Perseverance rover cost $2.7B. Only 6 organizations have ever landed anything on Mars. The knowledge stays locked in proprietary systems.
Start with a $150 open-source rover anyone can build. Prove the software stack on Earth first — AI orchestration, cryptographic identity, fleet coordination, marketplace economics. Then take it off-world.
Working hardware platform, 6 published protocol specifications, MCP gateway for LLM-controlled rovers, ZK attestation proofs, on-chain identity contracts, and a growing community of builders. ~500K lines of code built in the open.
Hardening the platform for field deployment, publishing reference hardware designs, running desert endurance tests, and growing the open-source contributor community. From garage project to civilization-scale infrastructure.
All code, all hardware designs, all protocols — open source, forever.