Asagumo

Overview

Asagumo is a walking micro-rover developed by Spacebit, a British company, on a single-unit CubeSat frame with four legs [1]. It was manifested as a payload on Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander for a technology demonstration on the lunar surface, was not aboard when Peregrine Mission One launched in January 2024, and Spacebit’s published material is no longer served.

The demonstration was to be modest and specific: deploy from the lander, walk at least 10 meters from it under teleoperation through the lander’s wireless network, and validate the legs, the wide-field cameras and the three-dimensional lidar over up to eight days on the surface [1]. The larger program it belonged to is what motivated the leg architecture. The stated objective is a swarm of walking rovers carried to a site by a wheeled vehicle and deployed into lunar lava tubes to map cave interiors, with surface analysis of mineral and water deposits as a secondary application.

Specifications

Parameter	Value	Source
Mass	1.3 kg	[1]
Envelope	single-unit CubeSat frame, 10 cm on a side
Legs	4
Power	solar
Sensors	wide-field cameras and three-dimensional lidar
Planned traverse	at least 10 m from the lander
Planned surface duration	up to 8 days
Control	teleoperation over the lander’s wireless network

The published record for this vehicle is thin. It consists of conference abstracts, whose full papers are not openly available, and company material that is no longer online. No mass breakdown, actuator count, gait, walking speed, step height, power figure, battery capacity, thermal limit, processor or radio parameter appears in any source obtainable here, and no peer-reviewed publication exists.

Mission profile

The vehicle was manifested on Peregrine and did not fly on it [1]. No other delivery has been announced.

Mobility

Four legs on a 10 cm frame, at 1.3 kg [1]. Neither the joint count per leg, the gait, the walking speed, the step height nor any measured mobility result is published.

The reason for choosing legs over wheels is stated as the destination rather than the terrain: the program’s target is the interior of a lava tube, reached by deploying a swarm of walking rovers from a wheeled carrier, and the surface demonstration on Peregrine was to validate the leg system before that [1].

Power and energy

Solar [1]. No generation, storage or duty cycle figure is published, and how a 10 cm vehicle with a fixed array would work in the shadow of a lava tube is not addressed in any available source.

Thermal

Not published. Protecting the robots thermally during the transit to the Moon, and building a lightweight deployment mechanism that does so, is named as one of the program’s major design challenges [1].

Compute and avionics

Not published.

Autonomy

Teleoperation over the lander’s wireless resources was the flight baseline, and autonomy was the development problem rather than the flight capability [1]. The approach described is unusual and specific: executing a mission through communication disruptions using proprioceptive sensors and position data for terrain navigation, rather than depending on camera and lidar input. That choice follows from the destination, since a robot inside a lava tube has neither a reliable link nor useful ambient light.

Communications

Through the lander’s wireless network [1]. Band, rate and range are not published.

Payload and instruments

Wide-field cameras, one of which was to image the rover itself, with full high-definition video capability, and a three-dimensional lidar [1]. On the Peregrine demonstration these were the subjects of the validation as much as its instruments.

Modes of operation

Not published.

Ground operations

Not published beyond teleoperation through the lander.

Technologies developed

Nothing was flown and no measurement has been published. What the program contributed to the record is a stated design position: that a lava tube mission is a navigation problem before it is a mobility one, and that the sensing which works there is proprioceptive rather than optical, because neither the communication link nor the illumination that cameras and lidar depend on can be assumed underground [1].

References