Development of an Intelligent Measure While Drilling System for Planetary Drills

This paper presents the development and preliminary validation of an intelligent measure while drilling system for planetary drills. The proposed technology is geared toward a rover-based drill capable of acquiring and transferring intact subsurface samples. The research builds on the results of experiments that demonstrated how the measured response of a working drill can be correlated to changes in the drilling substrate. The system employs feature exctraction and pattern recognition methods, trained and tested on data obtained from an instrumented planetary drill penetrating a range of lunar regolith simulants under controlled conditions. The proposed approach could lead to the ability for planetary drilling systems to perform two functions based on data collected from transducers and the drill control system during the drilling process. The first function of the system will be to extract and identify key geotechnical characteristics for mission decision support. The second function of the system will be for data collection, enabling the drill to be used as a scientific instrument.