Advantages of continuous excavation in lightweight planetary robotic operations

Planetary excavator robots face unique and extreme engineering constraints relative to terrestrial counterparts. In space missions mass is always at a premium because it is the main driver behind launch costs. Lightweight operation, due to low mass and reduced gravity, hinders excavation and mobility by reducing the forces a robot can effect on its environment. This work shows that there is a quantifiable, non-dimensional threshold that distinguishes the regimes of lightweight and nominal excavation. This threshold is crossed at lower weights for continuous excavators (e.g. bucket-wheels) than discrete scrapers. This research introduces novel experimentation that for the first time subjects excavators to gravity offload (a cable pulls up on the robot with five-sixths its weight, to simulate lunar gravity) while they dig. A 300 kg excavator robot offloaded to 1/6 g successfully collects 0.5 kg/s using a bucket-wheel, with no discernible effect on mobility. For a discrete scraper of the same weight, production rapidly declines as rising excavation resistance stalls the robot. These experiments suggest caution in interpreting low-gravity performance predictions based solely on testing in Earth gravity. Experiments were conducted in GRC-1, a washed industrial silica-sand devoid of agglutinates and of the sub-75-micron basaltic fines that make up 40% of lunar regolith. The important dangers related to dust are thus not directly addressed. The achieved densities for experimentation are 1640 kg/m3 (very loose/loose) and 1720 kg/m3 (medium dense). This work develops a novel robotic bucket-wheel excavator, featuring unique direct transfer from bucket-wheel to dump bed as a solution to material transfer difficulties identified in past literature.