EVE: A Preliminary Study of an Autonomous Robotic Assistant for Plant Cultivation in Future Lunar Greenhouses

The German Aerospace Center (DLR), as part of the International Space Exploration Coordination Group (ISECG), shares the vision of sustainable human and robotic exploration of the Solar System. In this context, the EDEN LUNA project introduces a Moon-analogue greenhouse facility for the demonstration of nearly closed-loop bio-regenerative life support systems technology and plants cultivation for the purpose of feeding a crew. An autonomous robotic system EDEN Versatile End-effector (EVE) is to be integrated into the EDEN LUNA greenhouse, to partner with humans in support of this food production and to enable sustained extra-terrestrial exploration. EVE operates in a shared-autonomy manner, wherein an operator issues commands which trigger autonomous operation of robotic system. This is a highly significant feature which directly impacts the workload of astronauts inside the greenhouse. This preliminary study describes the design of EVE and compares EVE’s preliminary performance to existing studies on agricultural robotics. It also investigates space plant cultivation experiments and ground-based green-house analogues to compare them with the automatized scenario presented in this work.