Robotic arms and drills How machines evaluate the soil of the red planet – Corriere.it

2023-12-15 19:18:06

Giada Meogrossi, Leonardo program manager: Robotic systems for space missions will be increasingly equipped with artificial intelligence and complex algorithms to recognize different situations and operate autonomously

If space has been the end for years, the effectiveness of the means is equally fundamental, technologies that allow us to explore, for example, natural satellites such as the Moon or planets such as Mars. Italy today plays a crucial role in the international missions of NASA and ESA, because Leonardo, which with its subsidiaries employs over 70% of the space sector workers in our country, also holds global leadership in the field of space robotics. By developing and building tools such as drills and robotic arms, it becomes possible to recover and study the subsoil of a celestial body, where materials and substances have not been contaminated by external agents. These instruments thus provide decisive support for recovering samples and moving objects to places never reached by humans and in contexts characterized by hostile environmental factors, including cosmic radiation and sudden temperature excursions.
Giada Meogrossi, program manager at Leonardo, defined the objectives: Robotic systems for space missions must be able to recognize different situations and operate autonomously. For this reason, drills and robotic arms will be increasingly equipped with artificial intelligence and complex algorithms. The expert, in addition to underlining the autonomy component for systems that must operate millions of kilometers away, also recalled the effective support that artificial intelligence can give them. An example above all is the robotics and mechatronics that characterize the robotic arm supplied to the Mars Sample Return mission, a NASA program created in collaboration with ESA. The robust instrument, 2.5 meters long and equipped with its own eyes and brain, sees and autonomously decides its own movements for the identification, extraction and recovery of Martian soil samples, such as those contained in the test tubes left on the ground of red planet from the Perseverance rover, and then bring them back to Earth (it would be an unprecedented result).
Together with its vision system composed of two cameras, the instrument receives information from the sensors and sends instructions to the mechanisms through a total of at least 600 signals. This architecture allows the system to make the best decisions on its own and coordinate movements capable of avoiding any impact with the lander or the surrounding environment. With the support of the Italian Space Agency, Leonardo also developed and built the drill for the ESA Exomars mission. It will reach Mars to look for traces of present and past life, digging up to two meters below the ground. Depths never reached before, where biological activities are not compromised by cosmic radiation. The drill will collect samples of material which will be transported to the rover’s laboratory to be examined in detail. Research intentions that may bear fruit only in the future, but whose foundations are already characterized by Made in Italy technologies.

In the photo, the UV laser transmitter created by Leonardo for the Aladin instrument, on board the Aeolus satellite (Photo Leonardo)

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December 14, 2023 (modified December 15, 2023 | 8:17 pm)

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