The ARCHES Space-Analogue Demonstration Mission: Towards Heterogeneous Teams of Autonomous Robots for Collaborative Scientific Sampling in Planetary Exploration

Teams of mobile robots will play a crucial role in future missions to explore the surfaces of extraterrestrial bodies. Setting up infrastructure and taking scientific samples are expensive tasks when operating in distant, challenging, and unknown environments. In contrast to current single-robot spa...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE robotics and automation letters Vol. 5; no. 4; pp. 5315 - 5322
Main Authors: Schuster, Martin J., Muller, Marcus G., Brunner, Sebastian G., Lehner, Hannah, Lehner, Peter, Sakagami, Ryo, Domel, Andreas, Meyer, Lukas, Vodermayer, Bernhard, Giubilato, Riccardo, Vayugundla, Mallikarjuna, Reill, Josef, Steidle, Florian, von Bargen, Ingo, Bussmann, Kristin, Belder, Rico, Lutz, Philipp, Sturzl, Wolfgang, Smisek, Michal, Maier, Moritz, Stoneman, Samantha, Prince, Andre Fonseca, Rebele, Bernhard, Durner, Maximilian, Staudinger, Emanuel, Zhang, Siwei, Pohlmann, Robert, Bischoff, Esther, Braun, Christian, Schroder, Susanne, Dietz, Enrico, Frohmann, Sven, Borner, Anko, Hubers, Heinz-Wilhelm, Foing, Bernard, Triebel, Rudolph, Albu-Schaffer, Alin O., Wedler, Armin
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Piscataway IEEE 01.10.2020
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects:
Automatic control
Autonomous agents
Autonomy
Collaboration
Drones
Earth analogs
Mars missions
Mars satellites
Mobile robots
multi-robot systems
Multiple robots
Redundancy
Robot kinematics
Robot sensing systems
Robots
Sampling
Space exploration
Space missions
space robotics and automation
Task analysis
Task planning (robotics)
Unknown environments
ISSN:2377-3766, 2377-3766
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Teams of mobile robots will play a crucial role in future missions to explore the surfaces of extraterrestrial bodies. Setting up infrastructure and taking scientific samples are expensive tasks when operating in distant, challenging, and unknown environments. In contrast to current single-robot space missions, future heterogeneous robotic teams will increase efficiency via enhanced autonomy and parallelization, improve robustness via functional redundancy, as well as benefit from complementary capabilities of the individual robots. In this letter, we present our heterogeneous robotic team, consisting of flying and driving robots that we plan to deploy on scientific sampling demonstration missions at a Moon-analogue site on Mt. Etna, Sicily, Italy in 2021 as part of the ARCHES project. We describe the robots' individual capabilities and their roles in two mission scenarios. We then present components and experiments on important tasks therein: automated task planning, high-level mission control, spectral rock analysis, radio-based localization, collaborative multi-robot 6D SLAM in Moon-analogue and Mars-like scenarios, and demonstrations of autonomous sample return.
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ISSN:2377-3766
2377-3766
DOI:10.1109/LRA.2020.3007468