Planetary Drilling Automation Blind Tests

Introduction: Commercial drilling, even deep-sea or remote, depends on human teleoperation. Lightspeed delays mean that coring and drilling beyond the Moon requires automation in order to not get stuck or risk mission failure. The Drilling Automation for Mars Exploration (DAME) is a NASA project for developing critical-path drilling software technologies. The DAME project’s purpose was to develop and field-test drilling automation and robotics technologies for projected use in missions in the 2011-15 period [1]. Figure 1 shows a lightweight, planetary-prototype drill, in DAME summer Arctic field testing [2]. DAME included control of the drilling hardware, and state estimation of both the hardware and the lithography being drilled and the state of the hole. Earlier DAME tests in 2004-2006 were conducted under field conditions in frozen fallback breccia in an impact crater (Haughton Crater) in Arctic Canada [2, 3]. While this was a good Mars analog (and hence a realistic environment to test Mars drilling automation), it lacks repeatability or precise knowledge of the drilling target, which in turn renders test results somewhat anecdotal. In 2007, tests at a JPL-developed Mars environment drilling testbed were conducted to provide a rigorous test of drilling automation, and provided calibration of the testbed by comparison with the past Arctic field testing experience.