LUNARES: lunar crater exploration with heterogeneous multi robot systems

The LUNARES (Lunar Crater Exploration Scenario) project emulates the retrieval of a scientific sample from within a permanently shadowed lunar crater by means of a heterogeneous robotic system. For the accomplished earth demonstration scenario, the Shakelton crater at the lunar south pole is taken as reference. In the areas of permanent darkness within this crater, samples of scientific interest are expected. For accomplishment of such kind of mission, an approach of a heterogeneous robotic team consisting of a wheeled rover, a legged scout as well as a robotic arm mounted on the landing unit was chosen. All robots act as a team to reach the mission goal. To prove the feasibility of the chosen approach, an artificial lunar crater environment has been established to test and demonstrate the capabilities of the robotic systems. Figure 1 depicts the systems in the artificial crater environment. For LUNARES, preexisting robots were used and modified were needed in order to integrate all subsystems into a common system control. A ground control station has been developed considering conditions of a real mission, requiring information of autonomous task execution and remote controlled operations to be displayed for human operators. The project successfully finished at the end of 2009. This paper reviews the achievements and lessons learned during the project.