After landing the Curiosity rover on Mars, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California built an educational model of the rover to teach robotics principles to high school and university students all over the US. While demonstrating this rover, they routinely received questions about how organizations could build one of their own, so the JPL engineering team set out to design a model that could be assembled from off-the-shelf parts for as little as $2,500.
The result of this work is the JPL Open Source Rover (OSR), a scaled down version of Curiosity that includes vital features like the 6-wheel steering system and Rocker-Bogie suspension.
Read more on the JPL Science & Technology site.
Check out the designs on GitHub.
