Lunar Rover Cargo Transport: Mission Concept and Field Test
In future operations on the lunar surface, automated vehicles will be required to transport cargo between known locations. Such vehicles must be able to navigate precisely in safe regions to avoid natural hazards, human-constructed infrastructure, and dangerous dark shadows. Rovers must be able to park their cargo autonomously within a small tolerance to achieve a successful pickup and delivery. In this field test, Lidar Teach and Repeat provides an ideal autonomy solution for transporting cargo in this way. A one-tonne path-to-flight rover was driven in a semi-autonomous remote-control mode to create a network of safe paths. Once the route was taught, the rover immediately repeated the entire network of paths autonomously while carrying cargo. The closed-loop performance is accurate enough to align the vehicle to the cargo and pick it up. This field report describes a two-week deployment at the Canadian Space Agency's Analogue Terrain, culminating in a simulated lunar operation to evaluate the system's capabilities. Successful cargo collection and delivery were demonstrated in harsh environmental conditions.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Sharing the Load: Autonomous Multi-Rover Cargo Transport
A future lunar habitat, as part of the Artemis program, will require a significant amount of logistics infrastructure. Cargo that is transported to the Moon will need to be moved from a landing site to other key location…
Distributed Multi Robot Lunar Cargo Transportation via Phase Decomposed Reinforcement Learning
Modular reconfigurable robotic systems provide a scalable solution for cooperative surface operations in future lunar missions. However, cooperative cargo transportation remains challenging due to morphology-dependent to…
Reinforcement LearningDecision MakingLunarNav: Crater-based Localization for Long-range Autonomous Lunar Rover Navigation
The Artemis program requires robotic and crewed lunar rovers for resource prospecting and exploitation, construction and maintenance of facilities, and human exploration. These rovers must support navigation for 10s of k…
PositionSingle Particle AnalysisState EstimationVisual OdometryShadowNav: Autonomous Global Localization for Lunar Navigation in Darkness
The ability to determine the pose of a rover in an inertial frame autonomously is a crucial capability necessary for the next generation of surface rover missions on other planetary bodies. Currently, most on-going rover…
RoverDevKit: An open, physics-grounded tradespace toolkit for conceptual design of lunar micro-rovers
Pre-Phase-A design of lunar micro-rovers is dominated by tightly coupled mobility, power, thermal, and mass trades, yet conceptual-design tooling for the rapidly growing sub-50 kg class is typically proprietary, weakly b…