The development of ongoing and future planetary exploration missions calls for novel, effective robotic exploration technologies. Inspired by the recent developments in terrestrial robotic teams, we investigate the design and deployment of heterogeneous robotic teams and the accompanying operation concepts in planetary analog missions. Specifically, we describe a single-robot and a multi-robot system we developed for analog exploration missions using legged robots. We focus on the field trials using these systems at the ESA/ESRIC Space Resources Challenge. We show a performance comparison of our approaches, including payload utilization, mapping performance, redundancy, and human-robot interaction metrics. Furthermore, we present our lessons learned on developing and testing single-robot and multi-robot exploration systems. Our work shows that a heterogeneous robotic team allows higher payload utilization and a safer redundancy concept than single-robot approaches. However, a higher level of autonomy per robot is required to scale up the multi-robot approach
