Study on Mole-Typed Deep Driller Robot for Subsurface Exploration

This paper presents a mobile robotic system designed to perform deep soil sampling for lunar subsurface exploration in the near future. Drilling robots have to carry the excavated regolith backward because of its high density. Therefore a new scheme is proposed, to move forward under the soil by making use of reactive force caused by pushing the discharged regolith. Simple experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.