Toward Lunar Legged Robots: Field Deployment Lessons at LUNA

Adrian Fuhrer; Joseph Church; Oliver Fischer; William Talbot; Nicolas Faesch; Yannic Hofmann; Hendrik Kolvenbach; Yusuke Tanaka; Marco Hutter

arXiv · 2610.12276

Toward Lunar Legged Robots: Field Deployment Lessons at LUNA

Adrian Fuhrer·Joseph Church·Oliver Fischer·William Talbot·Nicolas Faesch·Yannic Hofmann·Hendrik Kolvenbach·Yusuke Tanaka·Marco Hutter

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Abstract

Legged robots are promising candidates for future lunar surface missions because they can traverse steep, loose, and obstacle-rich terrain that challenges conventional wheeled rovers. However, readiness for lunar deployment is limited by uncertainties in foot-regolith interaction, dust generation, illumination-driven perception degradation, and operational constraints. This paper reports lessons from the 2025 LUNA analogue campaign, where ANYmal-D and Magnecko traversed loose regolith simulant and crater-like terrain and collected long-horizon navigation and visual-inertial data under challenging lighting. We show that quadrupedal robots can traverse regolith simulant, but performance is affected by sinkage and slip, dust-generating contacts, and perception failures caused by overexposure, shadows, and low-texture regions. These results motivate tighter integration of regolith-aware locomotion policies, illumination-robust perception, repeatable analogue testing, and mission-level operational validation for future lunar legged robots.

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Adrian Fuhrer, Joseph Church, Oliver Fischer, William Talbot, Nicolas Faesch, Yannic Hofmann, Hendrik Kolvenbach, Yusuke Tanaka, Marco Hutter. 2026-10-08. Toward Lunar Legged Robots: Field Deployment Lessons at LUNA. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12276

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