In situ food production will become essential in the expansion of human exploration in the Red Planet. When colonizing Mars, consumables re-supply from the earth will become not only very costly due to constraints on mass and volume, but also may cause potential psychological problems to astronauts having a diet mostly of packaged foods. The diverse technologies required for the biomass production on Mars, providing food and advanced life support operations have not yet been adequately integrated and demonstrated. In this paper, we develop an autonomous harvest robotic system and a biomass chamber on Mars to supply fresh vegetables and fruits as a dietary supplement for the crew. The unique feature of our approach is the use of robotic systems to replace human labor and provide optimal environmental conditions for plant growth. The system will provide an optimal and autonomous biomass production capability to maximize the ability to grow plants with minimal human input. First, this paper presents development of a biomass chamber and selection of vegetables and fruits that can be suitably grown in controlled environments. Then, an advanced robotic system is proposed in order to maintain the biomass chamber autonomously. It harvests, transports, and stores the fruits via remote operator commands. Sensors mounted to the robotic system will monitor the biomass chamber environments such as temperature, humidity, light intensity, etc. An integrated control system is also presented that provides stable operation of the robotic system assuming optimal growth and health of the plants under production. It provides autonomy, monitoring, diagnosis, fault-recovery and self-learning execution. Finally, we introduce our prototype system that has been operated on a near-continuous basis in the Controlled Ecological Life Support System facility at Kennedy Space Center.

KEY WORDS: Biomass Production Chamber (BPC), Robotic Manipulator, End-effector, Autonomous Harvesting System, Model Based Self-Configuration.

Utilizing Martian Resources