Inspenet, July 17, 2023.
A group of legged robots is being developed by Swiss researchers.
It is known that on the lunar surface there are mineral resources that humanity could extract and use at some point. Various space agencies, such as the European Space Agency (ESA) are already planning missions to further explore the satellite and search for minerals, which requires suitable exploration vehicles.
A team of Swiss researchers led by ETH Zurich is exploring the idea of sending not just a lone rover on an exploration mission, but a whole suite of vehicles and flying devices that complement each other.
That is why the researchers have equipped three ANYmal robots , a class of footed robots developed at ETH, with a variety of measurement and analysis instruments that could make them suitable exploration devices in the future.
These robots underwent tests on various terrains in Switzerland and at the European Space Resource Innovation Center (ESRIC) in Luxembourg. A few months ago, the Swiss team together with colleagues from Germany won a European lunar exploration robot competition.
During it, they were challenged to find and identify minerals at a test site that simulated lunar surface features. In the latest issue of Science Robotics magazine, scientists detail how these robots explore unknown terrain using their team together.
Robots with legs: safe and reliable
According to Philip Arm, a PhD student in the group led by Professor Marco Hutter at ETH, using multiple robots offers two distinct advantages. First, each robot can take on specialized tasks and carry them out simultaneously. Second, thanks to redundancy, a team of robots can make up for the failure of one of their teammates.
Redundancy in this case implies the installation of important measuring equipment on several robots. This means that redundancy and specialization are contrary objectives to each other. “Finding the right balance is crucial to reaping the benefits of both approaches,” Arm says.
Researchers at ETH Zurich and the Universities of Basel, Bern and Zurich addressed this question by specializing two of the legged robots. One of them was programmed to be adept at mapping terrain and classifying geology . He used a laser scanner and several cameras, some of which could perform spectral analysis, to get initial clues about the mineral composition of the rocks. On the other hand, the second specialist robot was trained to accurately identify rocks using a Raman spectrometer and a microscopy camera.
The third robot played a generalist role, as it could map terrain and identify rocks , allowing it to perform a wide range of tasks compared to specialists. However, due to its configuration, it could perform these tasks with less precision. “This allows the mission to be completed in the event that one of the robots malfunctions,” Arm explains.
Variety of robots for mission success
In the ESRIC and ESA Space Resources Challenge, the jury was particularly impressed by the inclusion of redundancy in the researchers’ exploration system, making it resilient to potential failure.
In recognition, the Swiss scientists and their colleagues at the FZI Information Technology Research Center in Karlsruhe were awarded a one-year research contract to further develop this technology. In addition to legged robots, the work will also involve wheeled robots, drawing on FZI researchers’ experience in wheeled robots.
“Robots with legs, like our ANYmal, do well on rocky and steep terrain, for example descending into a crater,” explains Hendrik Kolvenbach, lead scientist in Professor Hutter’s group. Wheeled robots may have disadvantages in these types of conditions, but they can move faster in less challenging terrain. In a future mission, it would be logical to combine robots that differ in their mode of locomotion. Flying robots could also be added to the team .
The researchers also have plans to increase the autonomy of the robots. Today, all your data is sent to a control center, where an operator assigns individual tasks. In the future, semi-autonomous robots could directly assign tasks to each other, with control and intervention options for the operator.
Source and photo: https://techxplore.com/news/2023-07-planetary-analog-environments-explored-team.html
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