Field Trials of the Integrated BreadBoard 3: Demonstrating a Rover System in the Sample Fetch Rover Mission Context

Abstract

The Mars Sample Return campaign constitutes a complex, long-term series of missions aiming at returning samples, contained in Returnable Sample Tube Assemblies (RSTAs), from the surface of the red planet to Earth. As part of this campaign, the Sample Fetch Rover (SFR) was conceived as a European contingency to NASA's Perseverance rover. The purpose of SFR was to fetch and deliver these samples to Mars Ascent Vehicle that would later put them into orbit. Although the concept of this rover was dropped in 2022, it drove the development and validation of autonomous traverse strategies along with autonomous sample pickup and storage operations. Useful for future planetary or lunar exploration missions, these applications are the context and motivation behind the field trials of the Field Test Rover System during the Integrated BreadBoard 3 project.This paper presents the results of the first real-world demonstration of such a robotic system. The IBB3 field trials took place in September 2023 at a silica sand quarry that covered a breadth of test scenarios, including benign, flat surfaces as well as irregular and rocky terrain. This test campaign served to build confidence in the GNC Mobility and RSTA Acquisition System systems and to identify any difficulties early in their development phases. In particular, this campaign encompassed a series of use cases for both systems: autonomous traverses using the novel Absolute Global Localisation algorithms and the sample fetch and pickup with a high level of autonomy.