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

Abstract

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 article, 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 Marslike scenarios, and demonstrations of autonomous sample return.

Assembling a Swarm Navigation System: Communication, Localization, Sensing and Control

“…In the same year, we demonstrated the system indoors at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Bremen, Germany. The BW was increased and the hardware was integrated into space analogue carbon fibre payload boxes, which can be manipulated by a robot [31]. In 2019 a scout mission took place on the volcano Mt.…”

“…In 2020, we integrated a multichannel SDR and an MMA into our experimental platform (generation 2.1), which enables real-time attitude estimation. A LOFAR demonstration as part of a space-analog mission [31] was scheduled in 2020, but shifted to 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.…”

“…Within the project Autonomous Robotic Networks to Help Modern Societies (ARCHES) we demonstrate technologies and robotic capabilities in a lunar-analogue environment on Mt. Etna (Sicily, Italy) in 2021 [31]. The demonstration mission consists of three scenarios that scientifically focus on geological research and radio astronomy, which are relevant for future exploration activities.…”

Self-Aware Swarm Navigation in Autonomous Exploration Missions

“…As a TRL milestone toward a real mission, a demonstration mission under the framework of the Helmholtz Future Project Autonomous Robotic Networks to Help Modern Societies (ARCHES) is planned at a space-analog site on the volcano Mt. Etna, in Sicily, Italy, in June 2021 [101]. The radio-based joint swarm self-and source localization system will be demonstrated in the LOFAR [82] submission.…”

German Aerospace Center's advanced robotic technology for future lunar scientific missions

“…Since flying robots such as drones are also used in the ARCHES mission, the fusion capabilities of lower resolution drone data from a bird's-eye perspective with ground-based, high-resolution maps increases the ability to combine different maps and data acquisitions to build up a common model of the mission area. In this article, we focus on the scientific and technological aspects regarding the acquisition of scientific measurements, whereas we refer to [ 20 ] for an overview of the individual technological aspects required for autonomous robotic operations. The following sections summarize the two principal tasks to be performed as part of the ARCHES demonstration mission: a sample-return mission performed by highly autonomous robots and the installation and maintenance of infrastructure elements: deployment of a distributed antenna array for low-frequency radio observations (LOFAR).…”