Toward Sustainable Space Exploration: Designing an AI-Powered Modular Toolbox for Future Planetary Exploration

Abstract

The possibilities for using modular space robot systems are constantly growing. To provide individual solutions for the requirements of different missions, modular reconfigurable building blocks can be used. This paper presents the MODKOM toolbox, including both hardware and software, with the intention to provide reusable components for use in space applications. It is populated with newly developed hardware and software components and their inter-connections. A semantic graph database was used to build the fundamentals of the toolbox, and it enables ontology-based mission planning and reasoning. Some hardware components of the toolbox have already been successfully used for the construction of two different robot systems.