Details of research theme
We seek a motivated postdoctoral researcher to develop an intelligent planetary rover for future surface exploration on the Moon or Mars.
Japan will make the first Moon landing by SLIM spacecraft by using purely domestic technologies and heritages. SLIM is a demonstrator of smart landing on extraterrestrial large gravity body and does not include long activity on the Lunar surface after landing.
Once the transportation to the Lunar surface has been successfully conducted by SLIM mission, the most promising objective of post-SLIM mission is a mobile exploration by a rover, which will survive for a long time to do some surface interactions.
The candidate landing sites on the Moon and Mars are terrains with high scientific interest, such as the rim of craters, the inside caves, or the bottom of cliffs. These terrains are too difficult for landers to directly access. Thus, a rover will get access to the target terrain after the landing module has landed on a relatively safe area near the destination.
Because of the risk of total loss when a single rover enters a cave, a new exploration method has been proposed that uses multiple robots, similar to manned activities.
The postdoctoral researcher is expected to investigate the new technologies related to future surface exploration by rovers, which include highly traversable mobile mechanism, new exploration system, localization, and autonomy of the rover to access these difficult terrains. The concept of the rover is different from most of the previous foreign ones, which explored for a long distance over relatively flat areas on the Moon and Mars.
In the future, your new research idea will be applied to future Lunar or Mars missions in our country. Therefore, the research process is based on the assumption that the rover is feasible in terms of power and processing capacity.