Toward Lunar Legged Robots: Field Deployment Lessons at LUNA

Abstract:Legged robots are promising candidates for future lunar surface missions because they can traverse steep, loose, and obstacle-rich terrain that challenges conventional wheeled rovers. However, readiness for lunar deployment is limited by uncertainties in foot-regolith interaction, dust generation, illumination-driven perception degradation, and operational constraints. This paper reports lessons from the 2025 LUNA analogue campaign, where ANYmal-D and Magnecko traversed loose regolith simulant and crater-like terrain and collected long-horizon navigation and visual-inertial data under challenging lighting. We show that quadrupedal robots can traverse regolith simulant, but performance is affected by sinkage and slip, dust-generating contacts, and perception failures caused by overexposure, shadows, and low-texture regions. These results motivate tighter integration of regolith-aware locomotion policies, illumination-robust perception, repeatable analogue testing, and mission-level operational validation for future lunar legged robots.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2610.12276 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.12276v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.12276 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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