Project

AstroAnt Canary Islands Field Expedition

Fangzheng Liu

Groups

The AstroAnt is a tiny robot that will be sent to the Lunar South Pole. It will do inspection sensing from the outside of a Lunar rover. The data collected by the AstroAnt will be used to monitor the performance of the rover.

The AstroAnts constitute a miniature robotic swarm for inspections and diagnostic tasks on the external surfaces of spacecraft, rovers, and landers. Each robot features a modular design; the sensor payloads can be tailored based on different inspection missions, and the data collected from the robots can be used to monitor the operations of the spacecraft, rovers, and landers. Working with Lunar Outpost, we are sending one AstroAnt robot to the Moon for a technology demonstration test. The AstroAnt robot will be working on the top surface of the MAPP-1 rover. With a thermopile equipped, the AstroAnt can do contactless temperature measurements of the rover’s top panel, which is the radiator of the thermal system. We can use the data collected to monitor the performance of the rover’s thermal system.

In Feb 2024, a new design of the AstroAnt will be tested on the Lanzarote island in the Canary Islands, Spain. The surface environment of the island serves as a good Lunar analog. The new AstroAnt will carry an IR camera and work on the top panel of a Lunar rover model. Our main goals are: to study the impact of a dusty environment on the performance of the AstroAnt with optical payloads, and the impact of the rover's motion on the tracking performance of the AstroAnt.

FieldWork Plan

An Aluminum board is carried by a rover robotics rover platform. This Aluminum board is to simulate the top panel of the MAPP-1 rover and it’s carried by a rover robotics rover. The AstroAnt will be working on the Aluminum board.

There are mainly 2 things we want to test about the AstroAnt platform:

Tracking the performance of the AstroAnt when the rover is moving.

The current ConOps of the AstroAnt is the AstroAnt will move only when the MAPP-1 rover is staying still. I want to test the tracking performance of the AstroAnt when the rover is moving straight. If the AstroAnt is moving when the rover is turning, the rover’s angular speed will be introduced into the AstroAnt measurements, which will interfere with the dead reckoning, and cause a large tracking error. I want to study how the straight moving impacts AstroAnt’s tracking performance.

The impact of the dust

The AstroAnt will be working on the Lunar surface, and the dust will be challenging. We want to study how the dust on the top surface of the Rover impacts the mobility of the AstroAnt.