Swarm Technologies For Future Space Exploration Missions

Abstract

Modern robotic platforms for in-situ space exploration are single-robots equipped with a number of specialized sensors providing scientists with unique information about a planet's surface. However, there is a number of exploration problems where large spatial apertures of the exploration system are necessary, requiring a completely new perspective on in-situ space exploration and it's required technologies. Large networks of robots, called swarm, pave the way: agents in a swarm span ad-hoc communication networks, localize themselves based on radio signals, share resources, process data and make inference over the network in a decentralized fashion. By cooperation, local information collected by agents becomes globally available. In this work we present our recent results in development of swarm technologies for future in-situ space exploration missions: a wireless system jointly used for communication and localization, and swarm navigation and exploration strategies to sample and reconstruct static spatial fields.