Planetary Surface Mobility and Exploration: A Review

Abstract

Purpose of Review With the continued interest in scientific space exploration and rapid development of the commercialized space sector, there have been a wide array of exploration technologies proposed for planetary mobility. This paper aims to survey these new technologies, explain the motivations and challenges of traversing different space environments, and describe why certain approaches will be more ubiquitous. Recent Findings A continued dominance by four-and six-wheeled vehicles for lunar and Martian exploration due to reliability, simplicity, and efficiency is observed. However, there is an emergence of alternative wheeled vehicle kinematics, other legged locomotion, and flying, climbing, or hopping robots when these designs confer specific advantages. Summary The engineering maxim "form follows function" is strongly represented within the array of robotic planetary explorer designs. The limitations of an irradiated, dusty, vacuous, remote operating environment which prioritizes efficiency and robust operation often lead to small iterations on working designs because deviations from the status quo are simply not feasible or deemed too risky. Those proposed designs which do deviate have clear justifications driven by their particular environments or intended purpose. Engineers developing future planetary exploring robots for space environments may find these considerations useful.

TerrainNet: Visual Modeling of Complex Terrain for High-speed, Off-road Navigation

“…Autonomous robot navigation in off-road environments has seen a wide range of applications including search and rescue [44], agriculture [11], planetary exploration [43,46], and defense [24]. Unlike indoor or on-road environments where traversable areas and non-traversable areas are clearly separated, off-road terrains exhibit a wide range of traversability that require a comprehensive understanding of the semantics and geometry of the terrain (Figure 1).…”

HTRON:Efficient Outdoor Navigation with Sparse Rewards via Heavy Tailed Adaptive Reinforce Algorithm

“…Autonomous robot navigation in complex outdoor environments has been an active area of research. The resulting navigation systems are used for different applications, including delivery [1], search and rescue [2], planetary explorations [3], etc. Such applications require robots to gather useful information efficiently from the environment to make intelligent navigation decisions [4].…”

The Need for and Feasibility of Alternative Ground Robots to Traverse Sandy and Rocky Extraterrestrial Terrain

“…[2][3][4][5] To date, all of the successfully landed lunar and Martian mobile exploration robots, as well as the majority of those being developed, have adopted a conventional wheeled rover platform with a variety of architectures. [5,7] This is not surprising because one of the highest priority considerations for space applications is to maximize mechanical reliability, where wheeled platforms have excelled. [2,3,7,8] These missions have been hugely successful, often exceeding mission design lifetime and traverse distance.…”

“…[5,7] This is not surprising because one of the highest priority considerations for space applications is to maximize mechanical reliability, where wheeled platforms have excelled. [2,3,7,8] These missions have been hugely successful, often exceeding mission design lifetime and traverse distance. The 6-wheel Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity currently holds the planetary rover distance record, driving over 45 km across Meridiani Planum.…”

“…To enable access to a broader range of terrain, besides flying [42] and underwater [43,44] robots, many nonwheeled ground robot platforms have been developed, most of which specializes in a single mode of locomotion [45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59] (for a review, see Thoesen and Marvi [7] ). These primarily include: tracked, [52] multilegged, [48,49,54,56] humanoid biped, [53,57] screw-propelled, [55,58] snake-like, [55] tensegrity-based robots, [59] scaling, [50] jumping, [45,47] and rappelling [1,6,46,51] robots.…”