Cooperative Robotic Exploration of a Planetary Skylight Surface and Lava Cave

Abstract

Inspection of lava caves in the surface of planetary objects close to Earth is of main importance for space exploration and scientific research. To demonstrate the feasibility and advance in the technology development towards exploring such structures, part of a cooperative robotic mission has been designed and tested in an Earth analogue environment. Three prototypes for next generation planetary rovers were selected and additional hardware was built. A software architecture was designed and implemented that enabled the robotic team to create a 3-dimensional environment reconstruction, including scientific data, of the area around a skylight, its walls and the lava tube underneath. The present paper describes the robotic mission, the hardware and software architecture, up to the level of the algorithms used by each module and the performance yielded in the final field test in a volcanic environment. The test results show that such mission is feasible although adaptations for a fully space ready technology are needed.