A Lava Tube Lighting Solution for the SCOUT Rovers Visual System

Abstract

This paper presents a novel lighting solution, designed to enhance the visual system of the SCOUT Rover, a robust and innovative cave exploration robot developed by the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The new lighting solution, enabling it to effectively illuminate and explore its surroundings in challenging and uncharted environments of Martian and Lunar lava tubes. It also enables efficient simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) capabilities due to homogeneous light distribution. A custom free form-lens system for a matrix LED system was developed to adapt the spatial light distribution especially to the lava tube topology. For this purpose, an energy-efficient LED driver circuit for high-power LEDs is realized, includes passive cooling. Future work includes the control of the brightness of the different areas in the picture. As a result, the visual illumination in lava tubes is enhanced, the way for autonomous navigation in future SCOUT Rover missions and is first tested in a Lava Cave in Lanzarote.