Emerging trends in Cislunar Space for Lunar Science Exploration and Space Robotics aiding Human Spaceflight Safety

Long-term human habitation and in-situ development on the Moon open a new era of space utilization. In this context, robots are a key technology for facilitating the construction of future human outposts. Toward the deployment and establishment of human habitation modules on the lunar surface, we propose a combined system consisting of inflatable modules and a modular, reconfigurable robotic system. This paper presents a report demonstrating various robot-assisted task executions using real hardware, namely the modular and reconfigurable robot MoonBot and the inflatable module HIDAS, to enhance the reliability of their deployment and maintenance. The demonstrated tasks include robotic inspection during inflation, module position alignment, final safety locking, and three-dimensional mapping for post-deployment maintenance. All demonstrations were conducted either in a laboratory environment or at a lunar analogue test site. Finally, lessons learned are discussed to provide essential insights for this robotic application to future lunar habitation.

Space robots are increasingly expected to perform long-duration, contact-rich, and multi-stage operations with limited human intervention. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), robot learning, and embodied foundation models provide new opportunities to improve the autonomy and adaptability of such systems, but their transfer to space is constrained by scarce mission data, space-specific dynamics and sensing conditions, limited onboard resources, and stringent safety requirements. This article reviews artificial intelligence-enabled space robot operations (AI-SRO) from a capability-building perspective. We first summarize representative operational scenarios, autonomy trends, and space-specific constraints. We then establish a three-layer technical framework comprising capability foundations, capability formation, and capability deployment/evolution. Within this framework, we review simulation environments, datasets and benchmarks; task and environment understanding, state perception, decision-making and planning, and action execution; and onboard deployment, ground-to-space adaptation, continual learning, and capability transfer. Finally, we propose key research directions toward trustworthy simulation and data, open-world multimodal cognition, long-horizon safe decision-making, physically constrained policy learning, and space computing infrastructures.

Space resource acquisition and utilization, commonly referred to as Space Mining, represent critical pathways for enabling sustained human exploration and unlocking commercial opportunities in space. These resources mainly include helium-3, water, mineral resources on the Moon and Mars, and abundant mineral deposits on asteroids. Due to the harsh conditions of space, communication delays, and high launch costs, the development of autonomous robotic systems is critical to achieving efficient, cost-effective space mining. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of space mining robotics and associated technologies. First, we review the background of space mining, including international policies, commercial entities, and recent advancements. We define a systematic six-stage architecture for space mining: Exploration is initiated by (1) remote sensing for target identification and (2) precise in situ robotic detection; Sampling progresses from (3) single-robot small-scale sampling to (4) multi-robot large-scale excavation; and Extraction integrates (5) autonomous resource extraction and (6) final integration into in situ construction or terrestrial transport. Additionally, we review and curate existing resources for space mining research, including real-world mission data, terrestrial analog datasets, and high-fidelity simulation environments. Finally, we identify critical open challenges in autonomous space mining and delineate a strategic research roadmap to bridge current technological gaps, fostering the transition toward a sustainable off-world economy. To track ongoing developments in space mining, we maintain an updated project page: https://github.com/OpenSpace-Lab/Space-Mining-with-Robotics-List.