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Autonomous lunar landing site preparation - testbed gantry components
Lee, Thomas Petruska, Andrew
Lee, Thomas
Petruska, Andrew
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2024-04
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Mines has been contracted by NASA as part of the Lunar Surface Technology Research -- Autonomous Site Preparation: Excavation, Compaction, and Testing (LuSTR-ASPECT) Project, whose ultimate goal is to design and prototype an autonomous robot that can prepare a spacecraft landing location on the Moon. Once constructed, the robot will require a simulacrum of the Moon's surface for testing purposes. In addition to a large "sandbox" containing a lunar regolith simulant, the testing environment includes an XY gantry system to carry the robot's power cord during the testing period. During this research period, we utilized SOLIDWORKS computer aided design software to design two major components of the gantry system -- the "truss movers" and the "cart". The "truss movers" are positioned under the gantry's crossbeam, carrying it along a set of V-tracks and enabling translation on the X-axis. The "cart" carries the robot's power cord and the gantry's electronic hardware and rolls along the length of the crossbeam, enabling translation on the Y-axis. Validation of the designs will be executed by building small-scale prototypes to test their performances and manufacturing processes. Completion of the components' designs has furthered the overall progress of the testbed, and construction will soon begin in the Earth Mechanics Institute.
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