Robotic exploration of the Moon and other planetary bodies demands autonomy that can operate reliably under extreme uncertainty—challenging terrain, harsh lighting, limited sensing, and delayed human intervention. To address this gap between simulation and real-world deployment, we have developed a Planetary Robotics Facility: a controlled indoor lunar-analog testbed designed for rigorous experimentation, validation, and iteration of planetary rover autonomy.
A Facility Built for Verification, Not Just Demonstration
While field tests are essential, they are often expensive, difficult to reproduce, and hard to instrument. Our facility is designed to complement outdoor campaigns by enabling repeatable, high-fidelity verification and validation (V&V) of autonomy algorithms under lunar-like conditions. The goal is not only to show that autonomy works—but to understand why, when, and how it fails.
Reconfigurable Lunar Terrain
At the core of the facility is a modular lunar terrain bed constructed using engineered regolith and granular media. The terrain can be rapidly reconfigured to emulate:
- soft soil and high-slip regions
- slopes, berms, and craters
- rock fields and obstacle-dense environments
This modularity allows us to run standardized benchmark scenarios as well as targeted stress tests, enabling controlled comparisons across autonomy stacks, rover designs, and sensing modalities.
Lunar-Like Lighting and Optical Conditions
One of the most underestimated challenges in lunar autonomy is illumination. Low sun angles produce long, sharp shadows, extreme contrast, and perceptual ambiguity that can severely degrade vision-based systems.
Our facility incorporates controllable lighting that mimics these lunar optical conditions:
- adjustable sun angles to generate long shadow fields
- tunable intensity for consistent replay across experiments
This enables systematic evaluation of perception pipelines, robustness to shadow-induced artifacts, and failure modes that are difficult to isolate in outdoor environments.
High-Precision Motion Capture for Ground Truth
To rigorously assess autonomy performance, the facility is instrumented with a Vicon motion capture system providing centimeter-level ground truth. This allows us to:
- precisely track rover pose, velocity, and trajectories
- benchmark onboard localization, SLAM, and state estimation
- align onboard sensor logs with ground truth for post-run analysis
Such instrumentation is critical for understanding estimator drift, controller performance, and the impact of terrain-induced disturbances.
Rover Platforms Designed for Rapid Iteration
The facility supports a fleet of reconfigurable rover platforms, ranging from single-rover systems to multi-robot teams. Each rover is designed for rapid swapping of:
- mobility components (e.g., wheels, traction concepts)
- sensors (cameras, depth sensors, IMUs, encoders)
- onboard compute and autonomy stacks
This flexibility allows us to evaluate not just algorithms in isolation, but the co-design of hardware and autonomy under realistic planetary constraints.
From Experiments to Insight
A typical experiment follows a structured workflow:
- terrain and lighting configuration
- Vicon calibration and ground-truth setup
- autonomous rover execution (single or multi-agent)
- synchronized data logging and replay
- quantitative performance analysis
Using this pipeline, we study problems such as slip-aware navigation, perception degradation, multi-rover coordination, and resilient autonomy under sensing or actuation faults.
Impact and Outlook
The Planetary Robotics Facility enables us to move faster and more rigorously from theory to deployment. It produces repeatable datasets, validated insights, and de-risked autonomy concepts that directly inform:
- lunar and planetary mission design
- autonomy algorithm development
- student training and capstone projects
- collaborations with industry and government partners
As robotic exploration pushes further into uncertain and extreme environments, facilities like this play a critical role in ensuring that autonomy is not just innovative but trustworthy.