In the space industry, the design, building and testing of rover prototypes is extremely expensive and system testing typically does not occur until late in the design/testing process, leading to a long development time. In response to this, Dr. Amir Khajepour, Canada Research Chair in Mechatronic Vehicle Systems and Professor of Engineering in the Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering department at the University of Waterloo (UW), and his team worked with the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and Maplesoft, to develop a Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) test platform for solar powered planetary rovers.