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This paper introduces a mobile robot equipped with a long-reach deployable boom and cleaning tool for autonomous cleaning of lunar solar arrays. The system incorporates a compliant wrist with distal force sensing and a velocity-based admittance controller to maintain stable contact during cleaning. Benchtop experiments demonstrated the system's ability to maintain approximately 2 N normal force with low RMS error while cleaning a planar surface at boom lengths up to 1.0 m, suggesting the feasibility of this approach for lunar infrastructure maintenance.
A long-reach robot arm can gently clean lunar solar panels, even with limited force feedback, opening the door to autonomous maintenance on the moon.
Commercial lunar activity is accelerating the need for reliable surface infrastructure and routine operations to keep it functioning. Maintenance tasks such as inspection, cleaning, dust mitigation, and minor repair are essential to preserve performance and extend system life. A specific application is the cleaning of lunar solar arrays. Solar arrays are expected to provide substantial fraction of lunar surface power and operate for months to years, supplying continuous energy to landers, habitats, and surface assets, making sustained output mission-critical. However, over time lunar dust accumulates on these large solar arrays, which can rapidly degrade panel output and reduce mission lifetime. We propose a small mobile robot equipped with a long-reach, lightweight deployable boom and interchangeable cleaning tool to perform gentle cleaning over meter-scale workspaces with minimal human involvement. Building on prior vision-guided long-reach manipulation, we add a compliant wrist with distal force sensing and a velocity-based admittance controller to regulate stable contact during surface cleaning. In preliminary benchtop experiments on a planar surface, the system maintained approximately 2 N normal force while executing a simple cleaning motion over boom lengths from 0.3 m to 1.0 m, with RMS force error of approximately 0.2 N after initial contact. These early results suggest that deployable long-reach manipulators are a promising architecture for robotic maintenance of lunar infrastructure such as solar arrays, radiators, and optical surfaces.