Electrical connector failures from dust contamination are a critical reliability problem in field-deployed autonomous systems: mining robots, defense ground vehicles, outdoor charging infrastructure, and ultimately in space where manual maintenance is not an option.

Dust Troopers is a student-origin team developing a modular dust-mitigation add-on for electrical connectors. The design combines two mechanisms:

• Passive moat geometry: The connector housing is shaped to funnel incoming dust into a capture region away from the electrical contacts.

• Active Electrodynamic Dust Shield (EDS): patterned electrodes on the moat surface drie a multi-phase traveling electric field on disconnect, sweeping captured dust out of the capture zone.

The add-on is designed to retrofit onto existing connectors without requiring redesign. The concept originated from the NASA L’SPACE NPWEE program.