The Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

Copyright notice: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract

Rover-mounted geotechnical systems are of paramount importance to lunar trafficability assessment, construction, and excavation/mining toward establishing permanent human presence on the Moon. These tools can also be used to determine density, when the regolith is used as radiation shield, for example. Two popular in-situ devices for establishing geotechnical properties of soil are the Static Cone Penetrometer (SCP) and Dynamic Cone Penetrometer (DCP). However, both systems have shortcomings that may prevent them from being robotically-deployed in a low gravity environment. In this paper we describe an alternative system, called the Percussive Dynamic Cone Penetrometer (PDCP) that can be used to robotically measure geotechnical soil properties in a low gravity environment. It is shown that PDCP data correlates well with the data obtained from both SCP and DCP testing, and by extension with California Bearing Ratio (CBR) and soil bearing strength.

Keywords

geotechnical system, penetrometer, planetary exploration, planetary rover, trafficability

Notes

Text Reference

Kris Zacny, Jack Wilson, Jack Craft, Vivake Asnani, Heather Oravec, Colin Creager, Jerome Johnson, and Terrence W. Fong, "Robotic Lunar Geotechnical Tool," Earth and Space, March, 2010.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Fong_2010_6583,
   author = "Kris Zacny and Jack Wilson and Jack Craft and Vivake Asnani and Heather Oravec and Colin Creager and Jerome Johnson and Terrence W Fong",
   title = "Robotic Lunar Geotechnical Tool",
   booktitle = "Earth and Space",
   publisher = "ASCE",
   month = "March",
   year = "2010",
}

The Robotics Institute

Menu