Towards Heterogeneous Robotic Teams for Collaborative Scientific Sampling in Lunar and Planetary Environments

Abstract

Teams of mobile robots will play a crucial role in future scientific missions to explore the surfaces of extraterrestrial bodies such as Moon or Mars. Taking scientific samples is an expensive task when operating far away in challenging, previously unknown environments, especially in hard-to-reach areas, such as craters, pits, and subterranean caves. In contrast to current single-robot missions, future robotic teams will increase efficiency via increased autonomy and parallelization, improve robustness via functional redundancy, as well as benefit from complementary capabilities of the individual robots. In this work, we present our heterogeneous robotic team consisting of flying and driving robots that we plan to deploy on a scientific sampling demonstration mission in a Moon-analogue environment on Mt. Etna, Sicily, Italy in 2020 as part of the ARCHES project. We first describe the robots' individual capabilities and then highlight their tasks in the joint mission scenario. In addition, we present preliminary experiments on important subtasks: the analysis of volcanic rocks via spectral images, collaborative multi-robot 6D SLAM in a Moon-analogue environment as well as with a rover and a drone in a Mars-like scenario, and demonstrations of autonomous robotic sample-return missions therein.