The Moon contains untapped resources that humans may eventually extract and use. Organizations such as the European Space Agency (ESA) are preparing to investigate our celestial neighbor more deeply to detect these minerals. To effectively explore the lunar surface, a team of Swiss scientists from ETH Zurich envisions sending not just a single rover but a coordinated fleet of vehicles and flight devices that can work together.

The researchers equipped three ANYmals, a type of legged robots developed at ETH, with a set of measurement and analytical tools that could make them suitable research devices in the future. They tested these robots at various terrains in Switzerland and at the European Space Resources Innovation Center (ESRIC) in Luxembourg; Here a few months ago the Swiss team, together with colleagues from Germany, won the European competition for lunar exploration robots.

The competition involved searching for and identifying minerals at a test site modeled after the surface of the Moon. In an article recently published in the journal Science Robotics Scientists explain how they explored unknown terrains with a team of robots.

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“There are two advantages to using multiple robots,” explains Philipp Arm, a postdoctoral researcher in the group led by ETH Professor Marco Hatter. “Individual robots can take on specific tasks and perform them simultaneously. Moreover, due to redundancy, a team of robots can compensate for the failure of a partner.” In this case, redundancy means that important measurement equipment is installed in more than one job. In other words, redundancy and specialization are opposing goals. “Taking advantage of the benefits of both is a matter of finding the right balance,” Arm says.

Researchers from ETH Zurich and the universities of Basel, Bern and Zurich solved this problem by expertly equipping two robots with legs. A robot has been programmed to be particularly good at mapping terrain and classifying geology. He used a laser scanner and several cameras, some capable of spectral analysis, to gather the first clues about the rock’s mineral composition. Another expert robot was trained to accurately identify rocks using a Raman spectrometer and microscopic camera.

The third robot was versatile: It could both map terrain and identify rocks, meaning it was capable of a wider range of tasks than specialists. However, its equipment meant that it could perform these tasks with less precision. “This ensures that the mission is completed if one of the robots fails,” says Arm.

It’s the combination that matters

During the ESRIC and ESA Space Resources Competition, the jury was particularly impressed by how researchers built redundancy into their research systems to make them resilient to potential failures. As a reward, Swiss scientists and colleagues at the FZI Information Technology Research Center in Karlsruhe received a one-year research contract to further develop the technology. This work will include wheeled robots as well as legged robots and will benefit from FZI researchers’ experience with such robots.

“Robotic legs like our ANYmal do well in rocky and steep terrain, for example when descending into a crater,” explains senior researcher Hendrik Kolvenbach from Professor Hutter’s group. Wheeled robots are at a disadvantage in such situations, but they can move faster in less difficult terrain. Therefore, it may be advisable to combine robots with different movement patterns for a future mission. Flying robots can also be added to the team.

Researchers also plan to make robots more autonomous. Now all data from the robots is sent to the control center, where the operator assigns tasks to individual robots. In the future, semi-autonomous robots will be able to assign certain tasks directly to each other with the possibility of operator control and intervention. Source