NASA’s Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot (RASSOR) is principally designed to mine and deliver regolith for In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU)processing. RASSOR’s design enables it to efficiently collect and deposit regolith, return collected material for processing, and myriad related ISRU activities. To reliably perform these operations on the lunar surface, RASSOR software and sensory systems need to be robust and maximize the information extracted from a reduced sensor payload. Herein, we present preliminary findings from the Intelligent Capabilities Enhanced RASSOR project. We apply supervised learning using real data to estimate the soil mass collected without the need for mass flow rate monitors or other explicate sensing techniques. We also create a reduced-order simulation environment to develop autonomous trenching controllers via reinforcement learning and prototype state estimation architectures. Our initial results suggest that excavated regolith mass can be inferred within 2.9% RMS error of full scale, and reinforcement learning for autonomous operations has learned viable trenching strategies and helped identify desirable sensing capabilities, arrangements, and considerations. Future work includes regolith mass estimation during dynamic operation, expanding our simulation to more complex environments, and transfer learning from simulation to hardware.


    Access

    Access via TIB

    Check availability in my library


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    ICE-RASSOR: Intelligent Capabilities Enhanced Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot


    Contributors:

    Conference:

    Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium Virtual Fall Meeting ; 2020 ; Virtual Meeting, US


    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English




    Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot (RASSOR)

    Mueller, Robert P. / Cox, Rachel E. / Ebert, Tom et al. | IEEE | 2013


    Design of an Excavation Robot: Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot (RASSOR) 2.0

    R. P. Mueller / J. D. Smith / J. M. Schuler et al. | NTIS | 2016


    Design of an Excavation Robot: Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot (RASSOR) 2.0

    Robert P Mueller / Jonathan D Smith / Jason M Schuler et al. | NTRS | 2016



    ICE-RASSOR (Intelligent Capabilities Enhanced-Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot)

    Michael Dupuis / Bradley Buckles / Joseph Cloud et al. | NTRS | 2021