Preliminary Results for the Multi-Robot, Multi-Partner, Multi-Mission, Planetary Exploration Analogue Campaign on Mount Etna

This paper was initially intended to report on the outcome of the twice postponed demonstration mission of the ARCHES project. Due to the global COVID pandemic, it has been postponed from 2020, then 2021, to 2022. Nevertheless, the development of our concepts and integration has progressed rapidly, and some of the preliminary results are worthwhile to share with the community to drive the dialog on robotics planetary exploration strategies. This paper includes an overview of the planned 4-week campaign, as well as the vision and relevance of the missiontowards the planned official space missions. Furthermore, the cooperative aspect of the robotic teams, the scientific motivation, the sub task achievements are summarised

Efficient Terrain Following for a Micro Aerial Vehicle with Ultra-Wide Stereo Cameras

In recent years, Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have drawn attention to the aerospace community. With such autonomous flying platforms, it is possible to explore foreign extraterrestrial bodies in an efficient and faster manner than other robotic platforms, like rovers. In addition, they can be equipped with a variety of different sensors. Cameras are especially well suited, since they are light, energy-efficient and deliver a broad spectrum of information. Following the underlying terrain in a defined height is a fundamental task for any exploring MAV. To accomplish this, many systems possess a designated height sensor, which in most cases only delivers a single height estimation taken from nadir. In such a setup, the MAV is just adjusting its height based on the current height estimation and does not take any terrain lying ahead into account, which results in delayed height adjustments. In this paper, we propose a novel method based on a wide-angle stereo camera setup, which is attached to the MAV, to overcome such problems. Due to the wide vertical field of view, the vehicle is able to not only measure its current height, but also the terrain lying ahead. Therefore, the MAV is able to perform a better terrain following compared to other methods, which use just a single nadir height sample. Our algorithm only needs to take the depth image, calculated by the stereo cameras, and the estimated gravity vector into account. Therefore, our method is very fast and computationally efficient, compared to other methods, which build up an entire map beforehand. As a result, the procedure presented here is also suitable for tiny flying systems with low computational capabilities and memory resources. The terrain following algorithm runs in real-time and on board the system, and is therefore also suitable for confined environments, like caves, and where communication delays are present. We evaluate our method with simulated data and real tests on an MAV. To demonstrate that our method works in a variety of different terrains, we show experiments with different slopes and obstacles in the flight path. We also compare our method to a basic terrain following by using just a single height measurement in a more classical approach

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

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

The ARCHES Moon-Analogue Demonstration Mission: Towards Teams of Autonomous Robots for Collaborative Scientific Sampling in Lunar Environments

Teams of mobile robots will play a crucial role in future missions to explore the surface of the Moon. Setting up infrastructure and taking scientific samples are expensive tasks when operating in such 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. 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 give a brief description of the robots' complementary capabilities and present their roles in two mission scenarios