Research/ PLANETARY ROBOTICS
The DLR Moon-Mars Test Site for Robotic Planetary Exploration
Martin Görner, Jennifer Cebulsky, Andreas Dömel, Maximilian Durner, Riccardo Giubilato, Moritz Kuhne, Marcus G. Muller, Kristin Lakatos, Peter Lehner, Roy Lichtenheldt, Bernhard Rebele, Mattias Roser, Ryo Sakagami, Yunis Fanger, Martin J. Schuster, Manuel Schütt, Wolfgang Stürzl, Mallikarjuna Vayugundla, Armin Wedler
Surface Mobility & TerramechanicsOpenAlex topic: Soil Mechanics and Vehicle Dynamics · Perception & State EstimationOpenAlex topic: Robotics and Sensor-Based Localization · Motion Planning & NavigationOpenAlex keyword: autonomous navigation
Building robots for planetary exploration missions requires intensive testing throughout all phases of the design process. Especially, during hard- and software development as well as mission training the process benefits of easy-to-access test sites that offer realistic conditions. For this purpose we have built the 1500 m2DLR Moon-Mars test site in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany. The facility provides a large variety of geological formations and ground substrates on a compact terrain as well as a rich set of power and network connections. As a unique feature of the outdoor test site, we prepared a dedicated link to the German Space Operations Center that enables telerobotic experiments from ISS. Furthermore, we provide an optical tracking system for ground truth measurement and control. We describe the design and construction process of the test site and present an overview of its features. Three experiments with our robots LRU1, LRU2 and the Scout rover regarding autonomous navigation and mapping, autonomous manipulation and sampling as well as advanced mobility tests demonstrate the usage of the test site.