Swarm exploration and navigation on mars

Abstract

We propose autonomous robotic swarm exploration to search for extra-terrestrial life in the Valles Marineris canyon system on Mars. The swarm consists of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Key technologies are robust flight and swarm control algorithms as well as infrastructure-less swarm navigation. The swarm navigation uses inertial navigation, laser scanners, cameras, and relative radio positioning systems. The later one employs hybrid time-division multiple access (TDMA) - frequency division multiple access (FDMA) and interleaved round-trip delay ranging measurements. For TDMA, an autonomous distributed slot synchronization algorithm is presented.We present a swarm scenario with initially ten elements, adding one element after 6.25 s, until 25 elements are active. The synchronization algorithm is stable transmitting only five out of eight possible symbols per TDMA slot for 25 swarm elements, but is only stable for 17 swarm elements transmitting all eight symbols per slot. Nevertheless, a distributed swarm navigation particle filter achieves an accuracy of 1m or better for 21 swarm elements in the later case.