Landing-load shaping under DART-S control

Characterize and determine how DART-S active-suspension preconditioning and guarded airborne control affect landing loads, including the observed difference between historical guarded CFC-10 median loads of approximately 33 g for DART and 43 g for DART-S at the 40°/13 m/s boundary condition.

Background

DART-S is evaluated primarily using post-touchdown attitude criteria and drivetrain hard-limit compliance. In the robustness and ablation analysis, the paper reports that the guarded DART-S configuration has a higher historical median CFC-10 landing load than DART at the confirmed boundary condition. The authors explicitly identify landing-load shaping as unresolved, indicating that the safety and load-management consequences of the pre-liftoff suspension intervention require further study beyond attitude recovery and wheel-speed protection.

References

Landing-load shaping also remains open: historical guarded CFC-10 medians are approximately 33 g for DART and 43 g for DART-S at this boundary condition.

— DART-S: Reachability-Audited Active-Suspension Preconditioning for Off-Road Vehicle Jumps  (2608.20275 - Hu et al., 20 Aug 2026) in Section “Ablations, robustness, and scope”