Robotics for Resilient Extraterrestrial Habitats

Purdue University’s Resilient Extra Terrestrial Habitats (RETH) Institute is developing the smart technologies humanity will need to inhabit the Moon and, perhaps someday, Mars.

The RETH Institute has three main research pillars:

System Resilience: developing the techniques needed to establish a control-theoretic paradigm for resilience, and the computational capabilities needed to capture complex behaviors and perform trade studies to weigh different choices regarding habitat architecture and onboard decisions.

Situational Awareness: developing and validating generic, robust, and scalable methods for detection and diagnosis of anticipated and unanticipated faults that incorporates an automated active learning framework with robots- and humans-in-the-loop.

Robotic Maintenance:  developing and demonstrating the technologies needed to realize teams of independent autonomous robots, incorporating the use of soft materials, that navigate through dynamic environments, use a variety of modular sensors and end-effectors for specific needs, and perform tasks such as collaboratively replacing damaged structural elements using deployable modular hardware.

MSRAL researchers are leading the work in the Robotics thrust in regards to mobile manipulation, modular end-effector development, and manipulation in constrained spaces.