Flying, Hopping Pit-Bots for Cave and Lava Tube Exploration on the Moon and Mars
This addresses the limitation of wheeled ground robots for planetary exploration in rough terrains, offering a novel mobility solution for space missions.
The paper tackles the problem of exploring extreme environments like caves and lava tubes on the Moon and Mars by introducing a network of 3 kg ball robots that can fly, hop, and roll, achieving a range of 5 km and 0.7 hours flight time on the Moon.
Wheeled ground robots are limited from exploring extreme environments such as caves, lava tubes and skylights. Small robots that utilize unconventional mobility through hopping, flying and rolling can overcome many roughness limitations and thus extend exploration sites of interest on Moon and Mars. In this paper we introduce a network of 3 kg, 0.30 m diameter ball robots (pit-bots) that can fly, hop and roll using an onboard miniature propulsion system. These pit-bots can be deployed from a lander or large rover. Each robot is equipped with a smartphone sized computer, stereo camera and laser rangefinder to per-form navigation and mapping. The ball robot can carry a payload of 1 kg or perform sample return. Our studies show a range of 5 km and 0.7 hours flight time on the Moon.