Grant: Alliance Grants

There has been renewed interest this decade in a return to, and permanent settlement on, the moon. One necessary technology to enabling a long-term lunar presence is the ability to exploit lunar resources, rather than needing to transport everything from Earth. Artificial intelligence and automation are a key component of lunar resource exploitation, since the hazardous environment of the moon means that human presence in the open should be minimized. This project fits into a larger initiative, led by the industrial partner, to develop a fully automated construction capability on the moon. Our long-term vision for the solution is to develop an autonomous robotic system to build lunar structures using sandbags filled with lunar regolith. In this project, we focus on the problem of manipulating and grasping lunar sandbags. We have identified three key milestones as necessary building blocks towards the larger goal. First we will develop the capability to model the behavior of lunar sandbags that takes into account the unusual physics caused by vacuum and low gravity. Next we will develop an AI-based system using a simulated training data set to train an automatic system capable of recognizing and locating a sandbag, including the problem of identifying one sandbag out of many. Finally, we will develop a strategy for grasping and manipulating the sandbags.