Perseverance is NASA’s Mars 2020 rover, exploring Jezero Crater since February 2021 in search of signs of ancient microbial life and collecting sample tubes for eventual return to Earth. This description was published by JPL’s own RSVP (Robot Sequencing and Visualization Program) team for mission operations visualization — the same kinematic model used to plan and review the rover’s real commands, not a fan-made or simplified approximation.
The mechanism
Six wheels in a rocker-bogie suspension: each side’s rocker pivots on the chassis, each bogie pivots on its rocker, and the front and rear wheel of each side carries its own steering joint on top of a drive joint — the middle wheels drive only, with no steering actuator, exactly like the flight vehicle. That’s fourteen joints for mobility alone (two rocker pivots, two bogie pivots, four steer, six drive). Above the chassis: a five-axis robotic arm ending in a turret that carries the coring drill, a stabilizer, and two covered instruments (WATSON, a close-up camera, and SHERLOC, a spectrometer); a two-axis pan/tilt mast for the Mastcam-Z stereo cameras; and a two-axis steerable high-gain antenna. Every one of these is an independent revolute or prismatic joint — no mimic joints anywhere in the description.
A caveat worth knowing: every link in this URDF declares zero mass. This is a visualization model, not a simulation-ready one — geometry and kinematics are complete and accurate, but there is no inertial data for a physics engine to act on.
About these files — read before importing
This links directly to JPL’s own m2020-urdf-models
repository, unmodified. Its meshes are glTF 2.0 (.gltf + an external .bin buffer,
all sharing one texture image) rather than the STL/OBJ/COLLADA this gallery has used so
far — ARMOR fetches and parses them the same way as any other format. Unlike most entries
here, this repository carries no license file and no stated license terms — see this
page’s License section for what that does and doesn’t mean for using it in ARMOR.