Wide Area Prospecting Using Supervised Autonomous Robots - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University

In January 2004, NASA established a long-term program to extend human presence across the solar system, a primary goal of which will be to establish a human presence on the moon no later than 2020, as a precursor to human exploration of Mars. A central concept of this vision is that future space exploration activities must rely on human and robotic capabilities combined in order to achieve a long-term and well-orchestrated campaign of space exploration. Thus, in order to meet these technological challenges, systems which support safe human supervision of fleets of task-oriented robots will be a necessity for future space exploration endeavors.

Our specific aim is to develop a general and widely applicable architecture for human supervision of a fleet of autonomous robots in support of sustained, affordable, and safe space exploration. We will demonstrate the benefits of this system-of-systems in the particular real-world task of wide-area mineral prospecting.

Together with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the NASA Ames Research Center we will develop a software architecture and system for autonomous cooperative perception, control, coordination, navigation, and information-sharing / management of multiple robots: the Robot Supervision Architecture (RSA).

The RSA comprises three subsystems:

the Autonomous Navigation System (ANS), which controls the individual robots of the prospecting fleet and their cooperation
the Hazard and Assistance Detection (HAD) system, which provides rover-based hazard/failure detection and identification, and guides autonomous and/or teleoperated recovery, and
the Telepresence and Teleoperation System (TTS), which provides an immersive information, communication, and control interface to the human operator.

In addition to the RSA, there are two additional subsystems:

the Networked Communications System (NCS), which carries high-bandwidth stereoscopic video, robot telemetry, and messages from the Autonomous Navigation System and the Hazard and Assistance Detection software to the teleoperation base and low-bandwidth signals from the teleoperation base for command and control, and
the Prospecting Task Support (PTS), which is the autonomous, with assistance from a human counterpart when needed, search of an area for in situ resources that may be present on the Moon and/or Mars.

A fleet of robots such as this is not limited to prospecting; it is also directly applicable to other tasks in other realms such as space assembly, inspection, and maintenance; and planetary prospecting, mining, and construction.

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