TY - JOUR
T1 - The ARCHES Space-Analogue Demonstration Mission
T2 - Towards Heterogeneous Teams of Autonomous Robots for Collaborative Scientific Sampling in Planetary Exploration
AU - Schuster, Martin J.
AU - Muller, Marcus G.
AU - Brunner, Sebastian G.
AU - Lehner, Hannah
AU - Lehner, Peter
AU - Sakagami, Ryo
AU - Domel, Andreas
AU - Meyer, Lukas
AU - Vodermayer, Bernhard
AU - Giubilato, Riccardo
AU - Vayugundla, Mallikarjuna
AU - Reill, Josef
AU - Steidle, Florian
AU - Von Bargen, Ingo
AU - Bussmann, Kristin
AU - Belder, Rico
AU - Lutz, Philipp
AU - Sturzl, Wolfgang
AU - Smisek, Michal
AU - Moritz, M.
AU - Stoneman, Samantha
AU - Prince, Andre Fonseca
AU - Rebele, Bernhard
AU - Durner, Maximilian
AU - Staudinger, Emanuel
AU - Zhang, Siwei
AU - Pohlmann, Robert
AU - Bischoff, Esther
AU - Braun, Christian
AU - Schroder, Susanne
AU - Dietz, Enrico
AU - Frohmann, Sven
AU - Borner, Anko
AU - Hubers, Heinz Wilhelm
AU - Foing, Bernard
AU - Triebel, Rudolph
AU - Albu-Schaffer, Alin O.
AU - Wedler, Armin
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 IEEE.
PY - 2020/10
Y1 - 2020/10
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Autonomous agents
KW - multi-robot systems
KW - space robotics and automation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85088702238&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/LRA.2020.3007468
DO - 10.1109/LRA.2020.3007468
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85088702238
SN - 2377-3766
VL - 5
SP - 5315
EP - 5322
JO - IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
JF - IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
IS - 4
M1 - 9134730
ER -