No abstract

Human-assistance rovers have a broad prospect in the field of space robotics, as a significant number of organizations and researchers have been investing in the design and development of sophisticated rovers for planetary exploration. In order to promote research and development in the design of nextgeneration MARS rovers, an annual University Rover Challenge (URC) is hosted by the MARS Society in the United States. In this study, we highlight the design and development process of several novel subsystems of a human-assistance planetary exploration rover and their successive integration in the prototype named PHOENIX, which is a rover that participated in the URC 2021. First, a detailed requirement elicitation has been conducted, for designing a conceptual framework for a rover capable of planetary exploration. Secondly, the design and development process has been detailed for five basic subsystems (power, communication, primary-manipulator, chassis with drive, processing) and two mission-specific subsystems (scientific exploration and autonomous navigation), as well as their successive integration into the rover. Afterwards, a detailed evaluation study has been conducted in order to validate the performance of the developed system. Terrain traversability, autonomy in navigation, and sophisticated task execution capabilities have been evaluated individually within this study. Additionally, the capability of the rover in detecting bio-signatures from soil samples using a novel Multiple Bio-molecular Rapid Life Detection (MBLDP-R) protocol has also been evaluated. The developed scientific exploration subsystem is capable of detecting the presence of life from soil samples with a 92% success rate, and from rock samples with a success rate of 93.33%.

A rapid multiple biomolecules based life detection protocol (MBLDP-R) from soil samples is proposed to embed in a scientific rover subsystem targeted for planetary analysis missions complying the guidelines of Science Mission of University Rover Challenge 2021 (URC 2021). The proposed protocol selects suitable biomolecules from a preliminary list through a requirement analysis driven filtration process emphasizing two factors: a) rules of URC 2021 and b) compatibility of the biomolecule test equipment to be embedded in a rover subsystem. To sort out the best test methods for finally selected biomolecules, a weighted qualitative test scoring methodology is applied. A rover subsystem that implements the protocol was built to perform onboard sample analysis. Evaluation results show that: 1) ) the proposed MBLDP-R protocol could effectively predict the classes with an average f1-score of 98.65% (macro) and 90.00% (micro) and the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristics (AUC-ROC) curve shows the sample categories to be correctly predicted 92% of the time (97% Extant, 88% Extinct and 92 % in case of NPL) and 2) the protocol is time-efficient with an average completion time of 17.60 minutes that demonstrates the rapid nature of the protocol to detect bio signatures in soil samples.

No abstract