GITAI USA has tested building a five-meter-high communication tower in an environment simulating the lunar surface.
The test was carried out in partnership with Japanese telco KDDI Corporation.
The tower was built using GITAI's lunar rover and three Inchworm robots equipped with 'grapple end-effectors' on both ends of the arm.
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After constructing the tower, the robots connected power cables and the system was tested. They then detached the antenna and disassembled the tower.
The inchworm and rover concept was selected for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) 10-Year Lunar Architecture (LunA-10) capability study in December 2023.
GITAI hopes to use its robots for construction, inspection, and maintenance services across a swathe of lunar infrastructure development projects, including in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) plants, power towers, launch pads, and more.
With NASA's Artemis effort to return humans to the Moon, governments and corporations are investing in potential lunar infrastructure, including data centers and telecom towers.
The successful Moon landing of Intuitive Machines' Odysseus last month included a virtual data center from Lonestar. The next mission, IM-2, will have an 8TB Lonestar data center and test a Nokia telco tower deployment.
