PRE2019 3 Group3

Finn, Nick, Rik, Stefan & Zeph

Problem Statement

One of the most important aspects of a space colony would be self-sustainability. Supplying a colony through space would be too expensive and resource heavy to sustain. This is why, in order to keep the colony up and running and be able to expand the colony it needs a way to collect materials and minerals. For this purpose we would like to research the possibilities for an autonomous mining robot that will search, collect and transport these materials and minerals for the colony. It needs to be able to navigate and move through the unknown lands of another planet, locate and mine the necessary materials and transport these back to the colony. For each task we need to research different possibilities and look for the best solution available.

Users

The users of these autonomous mining robots will be the space colony. This colony will entrust these robots with gathering materials for their building and renovation needs.

Objectives

The autonomous robot needs certain capabilities in order to function. These capabilities can be divided in:

- Navigation and movement

- Locating and mining materials

- Transporting materials

It also needs to have power in order to do these things.

In order to create such an autonomous mining robot all these capabilities need to be researched and should conclude in a solid solution to carry out these functions. Different possibilities for each capability should be analyzed and compared in order to gain the best inside.

SotA

General

https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/military-robots/nasa-training-swarmie-robots-for-space-mining NASA plans to use multiple mining robots together in order to supply a colony with materials. These robots should work together in a "swarm". They will work individual first, but when one robot finds something interesting it will call the other robots in order to help it with extraction.

https://www.nasa.gov/offices/education/centers/kennedy/technology/nasarmc.html Competition for students to build mining robots. Maybe a good place for inspiration.

Navigation and movement

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224471764_Planning_Smooth_and_Obstacle-Avoiding_B-Spline_Paths_for_Autonomous_Mining_Vehicles This paper is focused on underground mining. Uses four-wheel vehicles that minimizes curvature variation in the path it takes and stays in a certain safety margin from the mine walls. It presents a study that uses a B-spline for path determination. A B-spline (or basis spline) is a spline function. This means that the function can be reconstructed by connecting different polynomials. All possible spline functions can be reconstructed by connecting different B-spline functions.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8741532 The focus of this paper lies on aerial robots in an underground mine. These aerial drones use both visual and thermal cameras to ensure a good understanding of the surroundings in order to map in these dark, dust-filled areas. ~Might be interesting. No access to full paper however.

Locating and mining materials

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/5980489 While not about robots, this paper presents the method of using a detailed world model of the geological structure of the ground in order to locate different ores in the ground. It uses different sensors across the mining area, which could be placed on a robot which moves around, in combination with a supervised learning algorithm to build this world model. ~Might be interesting. No access to full paper however.

Possible interesting papers

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/262427/citations#citations