Design and Fabrication of Lunar Dust Excavator Robot

Lunar rover has become an important topic in recent years. Scientists are always searching the existence of lives as well as trying to create a suitable environment for human living in other planets. But for man it is difficult to collect information or investigate the new environment due to adverse environmental conditions. As an alternative a robot can be designed to sustain this adverse environmental situation for collecting necessary information or investigation purposes. So a robot, capable of collecting lunar dust can be very helpful for environmental analysis of moon at a greater extent. In such a situation this paper presents a general framework for building a Robot for collecting lunar dust, its motion control, lifting the dust, and depositing dust in reservoir. The framework is instantiated to compute the requirements including power, networking, mechanical controlling, and electro mechanical interfacing. The Robot has been systematically fabricated by local components and tested for operational results in similar artificial environment as on the Moon.Copyright © 2013 by ASME