Lunar base construction robots

President Bush called for the construction of a permanently manned lunar base. All serious plans for such a base require the use of lunar soil as shielding material against the Sun's radiation. Plans rely on the use of a large bulldozer-like vehicle to be driven by an astronaut, either locally or under teleoperation control. Brooks and Flynn (89) proposed an alternate approach to a single large and complex robot based on many small totally autonomous robots which trade off time to achieve the task with lowered complexity and cost of the system. In this paper the authors describe an experimental system they are building with 20 small bulldozers, which work without explicit coordination or communication, but nevertheless cooperate to achieve tasks that will be useful in building a manned lunar base. In particular the authors believe such tasks as digging out trenches in which the habitation units will be placed, stockpiling a supply of loose lunar soil to cover the habitation units, and actually covering them when delivered, can all be carried out by such small bulldozers.<<ETX>>