Advanced testbed and simulation environment for planetary exploration and mobility investigations

Abstract

Since several years space missions are more and more focusing on promoting mobile systems for planetary exploration.ExoMars (Mars), MoonNEXT (Moon) or even Marco Polo (asteroid mission) are promising highest scientific return.Dealing with the hostile environment and reliably operating in an unknown and unstructured terrain are the key features of such missions.Mapping, transportation, servicing and sample collection or handlings are typical tasks and involve traversing areas of soft soil, steep slopes, cliffy canyons or craters in a reliable manner.Mainly wheeled rovers are dedicated for such operation but also walking robots or lander based manipulators are suitable.These systems require a high level of autonomy and flexibility and must be able to cope with the wide variety of possible scenarios, and they shall be fully operational far beyond the nominal operating conditions.Exhaustive testing and simulation are therefore indispensable and must go hand in hand from the very beginning.Since several years already, DLR is advancing mobile systems for terrestrial and space applications, focusing also on demonstrations by using own testbeds with high precision measurement devices.This paper gives an overview of the entire test environment, which covers all aspects in a unique way: starting from the evaluation of soil parameters via detailed world modeling up to a detailed evaluation of the mobility performance by a combination of tests and simulation.Autonomously operating mobile robotic systems require complex task and navigation algorithms and high performance sensors.In particular robotic systems used for planetary exploration strongly rely on local autonomy e.g.due to the long signal roundtrip time.Moreover, local autonomy is dedicated to support telepresence operated systems e.g. by handling subtask like obstacle avoidance or optimizing the configuration.The new test laboratory at the robotic institute of DLR is used for testing a wide variety of mobile robotic systems and applications.Actually the test campaign concentrates on a six-wheeled ExoMars type rover.Moreover, testing additional rover concepts as well as the DLR six legged crawler are foreseen in the near future.