Flying, Hopping Pit-Bots for Cave and Lava Tube Exploration on the Moon and Mars

1. Introduction: Wheeled ground robots are limited from exploring extreme environments such as caves, lava tubes and skylights. Small robots that utilize un-conventional mobility through hopping, flying and rolling can overcome many roughness limitations and thus extend exploration sites of interest on Moon and Mars. In this paper we introduce a network of 3 kg, 0.30 m diameter ball robots (pit-bots) that can fly, hop and roll using an onboard miniature propulsion system (Fig. 1). These pit-bots can be deployed from a lander or large rover. Each robot is equipped with a smartphone sized computer, stereo camera and laser rangefinder to perform navigation and mapping. The ball robot can carry a payload of 1 kg or perform sample return. Our studies show a range of 5 km and 0.7 hours flight time on the Moon.