抄録
Various excavation robots have been developed for in-ground planetary investigations. However, there are no reports of any robots designed to discharge excavated soil. Soil discharging is necessary for excavation robots to achieve greater depths and more sustainable excavations. We previously developed a lunar explorer excavation robot that adopted peristaltic crawling as its propulsion mechanism and this robot incorporates a soil-discharging unit. This unit can convey the excavated soil to the ground surface from the borehole during excavation. However, the soil that is carried by the discharging unit is removed by a dust collector with human hand from the unit. In the future, from the viewpoint of automaticity, the soil should be removed automatically. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel discharging unit that removes the soil automatically.
