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Engineers to develop autonomous robot swarms to mine lunar resources
They received NASA funding for a new project to advance space-mining methods that use autonomous robot swarms.
www.inceptivemind.com
Engineers to develop autonomous robot swarms to mine lunar resources
University of Arizona aerospace and mining engineers have received $500,000 in NASA funding for a new project to advance space-mining methods. The result is the development of a swarm of autonomous robots and new excavation techniques that will be able, in the future, to search for and extract metals from the lands of the Moon.
To mine for ore embedded in the rock on Earth, miners need to drill through the rock. The engineers have developed an electrochemical process to drill through rock five times faster than any other method. In addition, it combined the space mining robots with a neuromorphic learning architecture technique, called the Human and Explainable Autonomous Robotic System (HEART), which trains the robots to work together on mining, excavation, and even building tasks and improve their collaboration capabilities over time through machine learning.
Scientists Want to Send Autonomous 'Robot Swarms' to Mine the Moon
A research team from the University of Arizona received a $500,000 grant from NASA to send a swarm of autonomous robots to mine the Moon.
Scientists Want to Send Autonomous 'Robot Swarms' to Mine the Moon
The team behind the robots developed an electrochemical process that drills through rock five times faster than any other method. This is combined with a neuromorphic learning architecture technique called the Human and Explainable Autonomous Robotic System (HEART) that trains robots to work together and improve their collaboration skills over time via machine learning. The team will build and train the robots on Earth so they can hone their teamwork skills in a safer environment before going to space. Ultimately, the team aims to deploy the swarm of robots on the Moon, where they will be able to build basic structures and mine for resources without instruction from Earth.
Space mining is also set to go beyond our celestial neighbor, as asteroids in our solar, such as 16 Psyche contain abundant materials — its net worth is estimated to be $700 quintillion
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Autonomous Robot Teams for Lunar Mining Base Construction and Operation
There is growing interest in expanding beyond space exploration and pursuing the dream of living and working in space. The next critical step towards living and working in space requires kick-starting a space economy. One important challenge with this space-economy is ensuring the ready supply...
Autonomous Robot Teams for Lunar Mining Base Construction and Operation
Abstract
There is growing interest in expanding beyond space exploration and pursuing the dream of living and working in space. The next critical step towards living and working in space requires kick-starting a space economy. One important challenge with this space-economy is ensuring the ready supply and low-cost availability of raw materials. The escape delta-v of 11.2 km/s from Earth makes transportation of materials from Earth very costly. Transporting materials from the Moon takes 2.4 km/s and from Mars 5.0 km/s. Based on these factors, the Moon and Mars can become colonies to export material into this space economy. One critical question is what are the resources required to sustain a space economy? Water has been identified as a critical resource both to sustain human-life but also for use in propulsion, attitude-control, power, thermal storage and radiation protection systems. Water may be obtained off-world through In-Situ Resource Utilization (ISRU) in the course of human or robotic space exploration. The Moon is also rich in iron, titanium and silicon. Based upon these important findings, we plan on developing an energy model to determine the feasibility of developing a mining base on the Moon. This mining base mines and principally exports water, titanium and steel. The moon has been selected, as there are significant reserves of water known to exists at the permanently shadowed crater regions and there are significant sources of titanium and iron throughout the Moon's surface. Our designs for a mining base utilize renewable energy sources namely photovoltaics and solar-thermal concentrators to provide power to construct the base, keep it operational and export water and other resources using a Mass Driver. However, the site where large quantities of water are present lack sunlight and hence the water needs to be transported using rail from the southern region to base located at mid latitude. Using the energy model developed, we will determine the energy per Earth-day to export 100 tons each of water, titanium and low-grade steel into Lunar escape velocity and to the Earth-Moon Lagrange points. Our study of water and metal mining on the Moon found the key to keeping the mining base efficient is to make it robotic. Teams of robots (consisting of 300 infrastructure robots) would be used to construct the entire base using locally available resources and fully operate the base. This would decrease energy needs by 15-folds. Furthermore, the base can be built 15-times faster using robotics and 3D printing. This shows that automation and robotics is the key to making such a base technologically feasible. The Moon is a lot closer to Earth than Mars and the prospect of having a greater impact on the space economy cannot be stressed. Our study intends to determine the cost-benefit analysis of lunar resource mining.
Exploration of Extreme Environments with Current and Emerging Robot Systems
Abstract
Purpose of review: The discovery of living organisms under extreme environmental conditions of pressure, temperature and chemical composition on Earth has opened up the possibility of existence and persistence of life in extreme environment pockets across the solar system. These environments range from the many intriguing moons, to the deep atmospheres of Venus and even the giant gas planets, to the small icy worlds of comets and Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs). Exploring these environments can ascertain the range of conditions that can support life, and can also identify planetary processes that are responsible for generating and sustaining habitable worlds. These environments are also time capsules into early formation of the solar system and will provide vital clues of how our early solar system gave way to the current planets and moons.
Summary: This article provides a review of the robotic systems developed over the past few decades, in-addition to new-state-of-the-art concepts that are leading contenders for future missions to explore extreme environments on Earth and off-world.
Modeling Excavation, Site Preparation, and Construction of a Lunar Mining Base Using Robot Swarms
