Towards automated Soil Preparation for Planetary Rovers - Methods for reproducible Measurements in Regolith Simulants

Abstract

Testing and qualification of planetary rovers most times require the interaction with soil simulants. In order to yield comparable results, nimble and accurate soil preparation is required. Unfortunately state of the art preparation methods feature either bad reproducibility and/or take most of the time of the test campaigns. This often leads to fewer, less reliable data in the narrow time frame of planetary exploration missions, as many tests need to be repeated. The problem gets stronger the softer the simulant gets - thus worst-case scenarios, crucial for rover missions, are least reliable. Hence in this article methods to automatically prepare soil simulants will be presented and evaluated. Furthermore an outlook to fully automated testbed preperation and testing is given using DLR’s robotic terramechanics laboratory TROLL.