Lunar Permafrost Mining Robot Prototype Demo
Channel: Orion Lawlor
Date: 2022-11-03

Our mining robot doing some mining and hauling, demonstrating a complete cycle.  We've been developing this for the Break The Ice lunar permafrost mining challenge since late 2020, and we hope to demonstrate a fully autonomous mining system in summer 2023 for the challenge Phase 2. 

Our summer 2023 livestream of this robot mining lunar permafrost simulant:
  https://youtube.com/live/D-ZfnQy_gGk

Our Phase 1 background video on why we're doing this, and why lunar mining is so important: 
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYMc3-YMdgU

This robot is a 24 volt lithium battery powered prototype, controlled by a Raspberry Pi 4 running our autonomy control stack. The electrical and control systems are still quite rough, but the mechanical systems are nearly complete. The robot hardware CAD and software is all available on github and is open source: https://github.com/AuroraRoboticsLab

We started this project because robotic earth moving is useful for a huge list of problems, from autonomous construction to removing snow from my driveway. We think lunar permafrost exists on the moon's poles, and if we can extract it, the water in the permafrost could be used to refill rockets on the lunar surface--electrolysis on water, H2O, gives hydrogen and oxygen, which is rocket propellant. This is important because lunar propellant could allow reusable rockets to fly back and forth to the moon, rather than throwing away most of the rocket and lander every flight like we did on the Apollo missions.

From our University of Alaska research lab, Aurora Robotics Lab:   http://auroraroboticslab.com/