SpaceHopper: A Small-Scale Legged Robot for Exploring Low-Gravity Celestial Bodies
Abstract
We present SpaceHopper, a three-legged, small-scale robot designed for future mobile exploration of asteroids and moons. The robot weighs 5.2kg and has a body size of 245mm while using space-qualifiable components. Furthermore, SpaceHopper's design and controls make it well-adapted for investigating dynamic locomotion modes with extended flight-phases. Instead of gyroscopes or fly-wheels, the system uses its three legs to reorient the body during flight in preparation for landing. We control the leg motion for reorientation using Deep Reinforcement Learning policies. In a simulation of Ceres' gravity (0.029g), the robot can reliably jump to commanded positions up to 6m away. Our real-world experiments show that SpaceHopper can successfully reorient to a safe landing orientation within 9.7 degree inside a rotational gimbal and jump in a counterweight setup in Earth's gravity. Overall, we consider SpaceHopper an important step towards controlled jumping locomotion in low-gravity environments.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2403.02831,
title = {SpaceHopper: A Small-Scale Legged Robot for Exploring Low-Gravity Celestial Bodies},
author = {Alexander Spiridonov and Fabio Buehler and Moriz Berclaz and Valerio Schelbert and Jorit Geurts and Elena Krasnova and Emma Steinke and Jonas Toma and Joschua Wuethrich and Recep Polat and Wim Zimmermann and Philip Arm and Nikita Rudin and Hendrik Kolvenbach and Marco Hutter},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.02831},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
To be published in the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation