Autonomous Moon Rollers

Last crawled date: 1 year, 11 months ago

Here is concept idea for An Advanced Lightweight Lunar gantry for Operations (ALLGO)

How to transport cargo to the Artemis camp?

video is here https://youtu.be/WwIIXia5-fg

Recently building a sauna terrace, I had to move a heavy concrete block.
I was quite surprised at how little energy I wasted to move it in right place.
Most Moon or Mars lander have legs. Therefore, the cargo is already above the surface. This work has already been done on earth. I think for the first missions, releasing and transporting cargo is more important than lifting it up. So you don’t need hoist system and you will win weight and cost.
Second problem what i want to avoid is how to make the hoist system stable. Because you will have lot of other problems when the cargo starts to commute when gantry moves. Another possibility is that lift up system is part of lander. Also for gantry 3-4 motorized wheels require quite a lot of weight. I want to avoid this additional mass and the whole body of the roller acts as one wheel and also as a load carrier.
Sandy and dusty soils require a very large wheel contact area. I'm afraid that gantry with 3 -4 wheels has too high risk that one wheel can fail then all mission is failed. So that's why my solution has very big contact area.
Roller dimension is scalable, Example roller dimension L=1900mm and Diameter 500mm estimated weight is 10-15kg

advantages
• Energy efficient 150-200w reliable gas compressor
• Quite few components
• Multi functional body (works as wheel rotated movement, works as worm direct movement, hold load, can reshape body for best angle to charge solar panels)
• One roller can clean second roller solar panels.
• Rigid pressure reservoirs works as wheel and compressor can pump gas back to avoid gas leak deflated mode.
• Flipper can help rotation,
• Flipper can help make sharp turns
• Flipper can help move roll left and right “like Sea Lion movement”

disadvantages
• Complicated Artificial Intelligence software (Neural network must predict pressure for all segments)
• (But as you know software does not weight so much as mechanical parts in space industry)
• Not suitable very mountainous areas
• Unreasonable for small packages

You can download Dynetics lunar lander 3d model here
https://www.dynetics.com/_files/hls/dynetics-hls-printable-models-20200611.zip