An Overview of Space Robotics Technology in Japan for Lunar or Planetary Exploration

Nowadays, new lunar or planetary exploration missions including landers and rovers have been earnestly studied in Japan. Those missions will follow up a lunar global remote sensing mission Kaguya or a small body sample return mission Hayabusa. Space robotics technologies make a lot of important roles in order to achieve those missions. They will cover a pin-point landing technology, a reliable landing scheme with obstacle avoidance, a safe landing mechanism on rough terrain, an exploration rover, a tele-science and tele-operation technology, an automated construction etc. This paper firstly introduces future lunar or planetary exploration plans in detail, which consist of lunar, Mars and asteroid exploration. Then this paper presents a robotics technology roadmap based on deep space exploration. JAXA has developed some test-bed robots. This paper also introduces the detail of the developed robots and shows some experimental results.