Real-Time Drilling Strategy for Planetary Sampling: Method and Validation
Publication: Journal of Aerospace Engineering
Volume 29, Issue 5
Abstract
Drilling and coring, due to their efficient penetrating and cutting removal characteristics, have been widely applied to planetary sampling and returning missions. In most autonomous planetary drilling, there are not enough prior seismic surveys on sampling sites’ geological information. Sampling drills may encounter uncertain formations of significant differences in mechanical properties. Additionally, given limited orbital resources, sampling drills may have a stuck fault under inappropriate drilling parameters. Hence, it is necessary to develop a real-time drilling strategy that can recognize current drilling conditions effectively and switch to appropriate drilling parameters correspondingly. A concept of planetary regolith drillability based on the rate of penetration (RoP) is proposed to evaluate the difficulty of the drilling process. By classifying different drilling media into several drillability levels, the difficulty level of drilling conditions can be easily acquired. A pattern recognition method of support vector machines (SVMs) is adopted to recognize drillability levels. Next, a set of suitable drilling parameters is tuned online to match the recognized drilling conditions. A multilayered simulant drilling test indicates that this drilling strategy based on drillability recognition can identify different drilling conditions accurately and have good environmental adaptability.
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Acknowledgments
The project is financially supported by fundamental research funds for National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61403106), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. HIT.NSRIF.2014051), Program of Introducing Talents of Discipline to Universities (No. B07018), Heilongjiang Postdoctoral Grant (No. LBH-Z11168), and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No. 2012M520722).
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Information & Authors
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Published In
Journal of Aerospace Engineering
Volume 29 • Issue 5 • September 2016
Copyright
© 2016 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Jul 13, 2015
Accepted: Jan 20, 2016
Published online: May 2, 2016
Published in print: Sep 1, 2016
Discussion open until: Oct 2, 2016
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