Mobile manipulation for planetary exploration

Abstract

Robotic systems map unknown terrain and collect scientific relevant data of foreign planets. Currently, pilots from Earth steer these rovers on Moon and Mars surfaces via teleoperation. However, remote control suffers from a high delay of the long distance communication which leads to a reduction of the time the rover can spent gathering scientific data. We propose a system architecture for an autonomous rover for planetary exploration. The architecture is centered around a flexible, scalable world model to record and represent the environment of the robot. An autonomous task control framework and a versatile constraint motion planner use the live information from the world model to steer the rover through complex manipulation tasks. Furthermore, we present the enhancement of our Light Weight Rover Unit (LRU) with an innovative docking interface for arbitrary tool handling. We showcase the effectiveness of our approach at the moon-analogue demonstration mission of the ROBEX project on Mt. Etna, Sicily. We show in two experiments that the robot is capable of autonomously deploying scientific instruments and collecting soil samples from the volcano's surface.

Autonomous Parallelization of Resource-Aware Robotic Task Nodes

“…For the world model we use the graph-database based approach presented in [19]. Finally, the logging mechanism of RAFCON was extended to generate Gantt charts for CDTNs and to analyze task executions.…”

“…The second computer runs the ROS navigation stack, the path planner process pool with several instances, the world model pool with at least the same number of instances as the path planners, the object detection process pool and several interfacing nodes. For world modeling we use the knowledge representation based on graph databases [19]. The third computer runs RAFCON as the task control framework, together with Rviz and a Gazebo client for visualization and debugging.…”

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

“…The robots benefit from their complementary capabilities: our drone ARDEA [6], [7] acts as a fast scout that can easily reach hard-to-access places such as craters or caves, whereas our first planetary exploration rover LRU1 [5] performs close-up inspections with its science camera and can transport ARDEA for energy efficiency reasons. Our second rover, LRU2 [5], [16] with its manipulator arm, takes soil and rock samples as well as transports, deploys, and manipulates payload boxes. The latter house scientific instruments and mobile infrastructure elements, e. g., to perform elemental analyses of rocks or to extend the robots' communication range.…”

Bio-Inspired Take-Off Maneuver and Control in Vertical Jumping for Quadruped Robot with Manipulator

“…Furthermore, the robot is capable of walking on all six extremities, which is a big advantage in difficult terrain. Lehner [ 3 ] proposed a system architecture for an autonomous rover for planetary exploration, the light weight rover can lift the scientific instrument from the ground and places it into the payload carrier on the robot’s back. The SpaceBok [ 4 ] robot equipped with adaptive planar feet achieved locomotion walking up a 25° inclined Mars analog slope.…”