NASA Awards Sixteen Grants For Feasibility Studies - Part 6 of 12 parts

NASA Awards Sixteen Grants For Feasibility Studies - Part 6 of 12 parts

Part 6 of 12 Parts
     Sixteen research projects drawn from NASA, the space industry and academia will receive grants from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program in order to study the feasibility of their concepts. Here are more of the projects:

9. A Titan Sample Return Using In-Situ Propellants

Steven Oleson
NASA Glenn Research Center

     This grant is dedicated to a proposed Titan sample mission using in-situ volatile propellants available on the Titan surface. This approach to a Titan mission is very different from all other in-situ resource utilization concepts. It will accomplish a return of great scientific value towards planetary science, astrobiology, and understanding the origins of life. This will be an order of magnitude more difficult than other sample return missions.

10. ReachBot: Small Robot for Large Mobile Manipulation Tasks in Martian Cave Environments

Marco Pavone
Stanford University

     The object of this grant project is the development of a mission architecture where a long reach crawling and anchoring robot is deployed to explore and sample difficult terrains on planetary bodies. Extendable booms for mobile manipulation will be repurposed for this project. The key focus of the grant will be Mars.
      The robot concept for this project is called the “ReachBot.” It uses rollable extendable booms as manipulator arms and as highly reconfigurable structural members. ReachBot is capable of
1) Rapid and versatile crawling through sequences of long-distance gasps,
2) traversing a large workspace while anchored by adjusting boom lengths and orientations, and
3) applying high interaction forces and torques, leveraging boom tensile strength and the variety of anchors within reach. 
These features allow a light and compact robot to achieve versatile mobility and forceful interaction in traditionally difficult environment such as vertical cliff walls or uneven flowers of caves on Mars. In particular, ReachBot is uniquely suited for exploring and sampling Noachian targets on Mars that contain ancient materials preserved in strata in the form of cliff-face fractures and sublimation pits. These will be of significant historical and astrobiological information. (The Noachian is a geologic system and early time period on the planet Mars characterized by high rates of meteorite and asteroid impacts and the possible presence of abundant surface water. The absolute age of the Noachian period is uncertain but probably corresponds to the lunar Pre-Nectarian to Early Imbrian periods of four thousand to three thousand seven hundred million years ago, during the interval known as the Late Heavy Bombardment.)
     In the NAIC Phase I effort, the team will investigate four key feasibility challenges:
1) Expanding the reachable kinematic and wrench workspace (where and what forces/movements that the robot can apply through mechanical design trace-off),
2) providing robust control and motion planning,
3) developing reliable surface grasping solutions, and
4) developing feasible mission architectures for exploration and sampling of Martian caves.
For testing, the team will build a planar prototype with several arms on the free-flyer robotic testbed at the Stanford Robotics Facility. If these tests are successful, this project will transition into an effort focused on building a full-scale robot to test the system in real-world environments.
     This study brings together an interdisciplinary team of experts in robotic autonomy, robotic manipulations, mechanical design, bioinspired grasping, and geological planetary science from Stanford.