Long-Reach Robotic Manipulation for Assembly and Outfitting of Lunar Structures

Future infrastructure construction on the lunar surface will require semi- or fully-autonomous operation from robots deployed at the build site. In particular, tasks such as electrical outfitting necessitate transport, routing, and fine manipulation of cables across large structures. To address this need, we present a compact and long-reach manipulator incorporating a deployable composite boom, capable of performing manipulation tasks across large structures and workspaces. We characterize the deflection, vibration, and blossoming characteristics inherent to the deployable structure, and present a manipulation control strategy to mitigate these effects. Experiments indicate an average endpoint accuracy error of less than 15 mm for boom lengths up to 1.8 m. We demonstrate the approach with a cable routing task to illustrate the potential for lunar outfitting applications that benefit from long reach.

Long-Reach Robotic Cleaning for Lunar Solar Arrays

Commercial lunar activity is accelerating the need for reliable surface infrastructure and routine operations to keep it functioning. Maintenance tasks such as inspection, cleaning, dust mitigation, and minor repair are essential to preserve performance and extend system life. A specific application is the cleaning of lunar solar arrays. Solar arrays are expected to provide substantial fraction of lunar surface power and operate for months to years, supplying continuous energy to landers, habitats, and surface assets, making sustained output mission-critical. However, over time lunar dust accumulates on these large solar arrays, which can rapidly degrade panel output and reduce mission lifetime. We propose a small mobile robot equipped with a long-reach, lightweight deployable boom and interchangeable cleaning tool to perform gentle cleaning over meter-scale workspaces with minimal human involvement. Building on prior vision-guided long-reach manipulation, we add a compliant wrist with distal force sensing and a velocity-based admittance controller to regulate stable contact during surface cleaning. In preliminary benchtop experiments on a planar surface, the system maintained approximately 2 N normal force while executing a simple cleaning motion over boom lengths from 0.3 m to 1.0 m, with RMS force error of approximately 0.2 N after initial contact. These early results suggest that deployable long-reach manipulators are a promising architecture for robotic maintenance of lunar infrastructure such as solar arrays, radiators, and optical surfaces.

Imagen 3

We introduce Imagen 3, a latent diffusion model that generates high quality images from text prompts. We describe our quality and responsibility evaluations. Imagen 3 is preferred over other state-of-the-art (SOTA) models at the time of evaluation. In addition, we discuss issues around safety and representation, as well as methods we used to minimize the potential harm of our models.