The Pittsburgh space robotics company Astrobotic has delivered its CubeRover to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the robot will undergo a battery of mobility and drop tests in a simulated lunar terrain.

Co-developed by Astrobotic and Carnegie Mellon University with input from a NASA Kennedy team, CubeRover is a small, light robotic rover designed as an affordable mobile platform for scientific instruments and other payloads to operate on the surface of the moon.

"Because our CubeRover is so light — in the four-kilogram range — it dramatically reduces flight cost, making the moon more accessible to more customers," said Mike Provenzano, Astrobotic's director of planetary mobility.

CubeRover is a commercial version of Iris, a CMU-built rover scheduled to land on the moon as early as next summer.