Design and Implementation of in-Situ Thermal Probe of Lunar Surface Regolith Deployed by a Quadruped Robot

Lunar thermal detection aids in studying planetary formation and evolution, while mobile in-situ detection enables data collection from various locations. This paper introduces a mobile thermal detection system for deploying probes on the lunar surface, detailing its configuration on a quadruped robot, actuation mechanism, electronic components, and thermal probe. A data interpretation algorithm is proposed to predict thermal conductivity, with experimental and simulation comparisons. The proposed method increases the predictive correlation coefficient <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$R^{2}$</tex> of lunar soil simulations from 0.5246 to 0.9494, which is based on a calibration model E-FEM with a relative error of less than 2% in the relative temperature change from experiments.