Earth-worm typed Drilling robot for subsurface planetary exploration

Abstract

This paper presents a mobile robotic system designed to perform deep soil sampling for lunar or planetary subsurface exploration in the near future. Drilling robots have to carry the excavated fine sand, regolith backward because of the high density. Therefore a new scheme is proposed, to move forward under the soil by making use of reactive force caused by pushing the discharged regolith. The first simple experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.