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Publication

LUNARES: Lunar Crater Exploration with Heterogeneous Multi Robot Systems

Florian Cordes; Ingo Ahrns; Sebastian Bartsch; Timo Birnschein; Alexander Dettmann; Stéphane Estable; Stefan Haase; Jens Hilljegerdes; David Koebel; Steffen Planthaber; Thomas M. Roehr; Marc Scheper; Frank Kirchner
In: Junku Yuh (Hrsg.). Journal of Intelligent Service Robotics, Vol. Special Issue on Space Robotics, Pages 61-89, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2010.

Abstract

The LUNARES project emulates the retrieval of a scientific sample from a in a robotic mission. The reference of this demonstration scenario is the Shakelton crater at the lunar south pole, where samples of scientific interest are expected in permanently shadowed regions. 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 integrated 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.