Concept illustration of a mobile base (wheeled rover) equipped with a long-reach (5-10m) deployable manipulator arm for cleaning large solar arrays.
Sustained lunar surface operations require regular maintenance of critical infrastructure, particularly the cleaning and inspection of large solar arrays that degrade due to dust accumulation. We present a small mobile robot equipped with a long-reach, lightweight deployable boom and interchangeable cleaning tool designed to perform meter-scale maintenance tasks across varied array configurations. Building on prior work demonstrating accurate vision-guided manipulation with deployable composite booms, we integrate a compliant wrist with distal force sensing and velocity-based admittance control to enable stable, repeatable contact for gentle cleaning operations. The control strategy regulates force interaction while performing simple vertical-motion cleaning primitives. Preliminary benchtop results demonstrate stable force regulation below 2N normal force, indicating the feasibility of this approach for lunar surface maintenance applications.
Measured normal force goes through a simple admittance control block (tuned for current robot compliance) to set an approach normal velocity into the task surface. Tangential velocity is commanded separately for surface trajectory following. This allows for gentle, steady contact while moving along surfaces.
A long-reach deployable boom manipulator with compliant self-aligning wrist, 6-axis force sensor, and soft wiper pad maintaining normal contact with a vertical surface. Force and commanded normal velocity are plotted for three phases: (1) during approach (2) contact stabilization (3) trajectory following. We see that the admittance controller in the surface normal direction allows for stable tracking of desired forces in the range of ~2N.
