LUNARES: lunar crater exploration with heterogeneous multi robot systems

Abstract

The LUNARES (Lunar Crater Exploration Scenario) project emulates the retrieval of a scientific sample from within a permanently shadowed lunar crater by means of a heterogeneous robotic system. For the accomplished earth demonstration scenario, the Shakelton crater at the lunar south pole is taken as reference. In the areas of permanent darkness within this crater, samples of scientific interest are expected. For accomplishment of such kind of mission, an approach of a heterogeneous robotic team consisting of a wheeled rover, a legged scout as well as a robotic arm mounted on the landing unit was chosen. All robots act as a team to reach the mission goal. To prove the feasibility of the chosen approach, an artificial lunar crater environment has been established to test and demonstrate the capabilities of the robotic systems. Figure 1 depicts the systems in the artificial crater environment. For LUNARES, preexisting robots were used and modified were needed in order to integrate all subsystems into a common system control. A ground control station has been developed considering conditions of a real mission, requiring information of autonomous task execution and remote controlled operations to be displayed for human operators. The project successfully finished at the end of 2009. This paper reviews the achievements and lessons learned during the project.

Ad Hoc Network-Based Task Allocation With Resource-Aware Cost Generation for Multirobot Systems

“…The numbers in the nodes are the robot IDs, and the pair next to each node is the ID and the cost of the winner information of the node. For example, (1,10) in (a) represents that robot 1 currently regards itself as the winner, and its cost is 10. lower costs than robot 1, each considers itself as the winner, and thus, robots 2 and 3 broadcast (2,8) and (3,7), respectively. Since robot 3 has lower cost than robots 1 and 2, robot 1 updates its pair from (1,10) to (3,7) after receiving the messages from robots 2 and 3, as shown in Fig.…”

“…In the mission, a team of robots with limited com-munication range negotiate with each other for task allocation and autonomously execute the tasks as fast as possible, as well as occasionally refill their resources in refill stations. Examples of such application areas are planetary exploration [10], automated warehouse management [11], [12], urban hygiene management [13], and agriculture automation [14]. One of the important issues for such domains is the consideration of the robots' finite expendable resources.…”

Reconfigurable Integrated Multirobot Exploration System (RIMRES): Heterogeneous Modular Reconfigurable Robots for Space Exploration

“…It is able to climb in steep slopes and can use the front pair of legs as manipulation devices. Although it was not specifically designed for a multirobot team, it was still able to act as a scouting robot in a scenario similar to the one presented in this approach (Cordes et al., ). Based on the experiences with Scorpion, different types of legged walking robots have been developed, e.g., the four‐legged Aramies (Spenneberg et al., ) and the six‐legged SpaceClimber (Bartsch et al., ).…”

Evaluation of a dust-resistant docking mechanism for surface exploration robots

“…Therefore, the camera integrated in the female part of the EMI is used to detect visual markers on the male part. This approach of visual servoing for reconfiguration has already been successfully implemented in an artificial crater environment with realistic lighting conditions [13]. 3) several connector types for electric contact in dusty environments As a further aspect, two different brace materials were tested: brass (MS58) and synthetic material (PA6).…”