Make Every Step an Experiment: Towards Terrain-aware, High-mobility Robots for Planetary Explorations

Robot-aided exploration is crucial for planetary explorations. However, many high-value scientific sites, such as Martian dunes and lunar craters, present significant challenges due to loose, deformable regolith, rugged terrain, and steep slopes, limiting the scope of scientific exploration and discoveries.

To bridge this gap, my group’s work integrates locomotion science, granular physics, and proprioceptive sensing, to develop new strategies for robots to individually and cooperatively explore challenging planetary surfaces, opening new frontiers for exploration and transforming our understanding of planetary environments.

In this talk, I will present our recent progress in two main directions. First, I will show that by strategically eliciting the force responses from loose regolith, robots could generate desired ground reaction forces and achieve substantially improved locomotion performance on deformable substrates. Second, I will show that by leveraging the high force transparency of direct-drive actuators, robots can use their legs as proprioceptive sensors to opportunistically determine the terramechanical properties of regolith from every step.

By integrating these two advancements, robots can flexibly adapt their locomotion strategies based on sensed terrain properties, leading to enhanced performance across complex terrains. Furthermore, every step becomes an opportunity to collect high-resolution environmental data, yielding unique datasets for scientific discovery. I will conclude with a few on-going directions that highlight how these advancements can enable new operation modes for future space exploration.