Lunar Excavator Mission Operations Using Dynamic Movement Primitives

Abstract

To support sustainable infrastructure on the Moon, NASA must leverage robots to extract lunar resources for in-situ processing and construction. As part of this effort, NASA is launching the in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) Pilot Excavator later this decade to validate a robotic regolith excavator based on the Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot (RASSOR). RASSOR is designed to extract and transport regolith to meet the needs of ISRU architectures. During its mission, Pilot Excavator will be tasked with driving in test patterns to demonstrate the operational concept. One possible test pattern is a circular trajectory around the lander while avoiding surface hazards such as lunar rocks. To this end, we utilize dynamic movement primitives to represent navigation sequences as primitive trajectories. We introduce a novel obstacle avoidance parameter, which is configured to avoid rocks throughout testing exercises. We demonstrate the effectiveness our method in a newly developed simulation tool called the Simulated Excavation Environment for Lunar Operations (SEELO) using models based on the NASA RASSOR 2.0 excavator. Our results show that the robot is able to safety and robustly navigate the lunar surface with densely populated rock obstacles while retaining the desired circle pattern behavior.