Amphibious modular robotic astrobiology

Abstract

This paper presents the design of a robot that can traverse land, water, as well as quicksand-like mud. The robot is low cost and modular allowing the replacement of a variety of arms suitable for many of the tasks associated with astrobiological exploration. An astrobiologist on a field study will spend most of the time walking around and exploring the site looking for areas of interest which will be tested in situ or sampled for testing offsite. For a robot replicating these tasks, it must be able to locomote in that terrain, sense the interesting features (or provide sensing for teleoperation), and do a variety of manipulation tasks once an area of interest is reached. The configurations for this robot include 10's of modules that can achieve astrobiological tasks such as amphibious locomotion, digging, core sampling, probing, liquid sampling and exploration. This paper also presents results from the first experiments of this platform at Lake Tyrrell, a salt lake in Australia.