Lunar Analogue Mission
CoRob-X Field Trials, Lanzarote 2023
A new field trial of the project took place between January 20th and February 11th, 2023.
It took place on Lanzarote and involved testing the robots in a realistic environment.
During the mission, detailed daily blog entries were written on site.
These can be viewed at the following link.
Space Analogue Mission
The lab tests were followed by a final large-scale and highly visible demonstration of all four mission phases in an analogue site. For a duration of 3 weeks, the robot team was tested in a realistic and very difficult outdoor environment. The analogue site had to be in Europe, both to avoid unnecessary costs and complications with customs, and to ensure optimal media coverage.
A preliminary site evaluation and trade-off during the first project phase revealed that suitable analogue sites for extraterrestrial lava tubes are not easy to find in Europe. The best candidates that were identified are sites in the Canary Islands. As the islands are volcanic, they all feature lava tubes. Selection criteria for the site were mainly size and form, weather conditions, accessibility (for both the rovers and the support team), legal constraints (e.g. national parks), and the logistics infrastructure available at the site.
The trade-off analysis and a site scouting by DFKI staff revealed that the island of Lanzarote provided the best options. Thus a cave in the north-eastern part of the island was selected for the analogue mission.
The Lanzarote site was used to simulate the exploration of a lunar lava tube by a multi-agent robotic team. This CoRob-X ADRES (Advanced Robotic Exploration System) was composed of three rovers, or Robotic Explorer Units (REUs), each equipped with very specific capabilities. The involved rovers were SherpaTT (REU-1), Coyote-III (REU-2), and LUVMI-X (REU-3).
The Lunar Analogue Mission comprised surface exploration, exploration of the lava tube entry hole (skylight), descent into the skylight, and exploration of the lava tube form the inside. The different phases of the mission were performed by all three REUs and/or sub-sets of the ADRES team.
The main objective of this analogue mission was a proof-of-concept under difficult environmental conditions. The tests involved technologies required to plan, navigate, traverse and investigate both the planetary surface and the lava tube. This included capabilities for autonomous planning, cooperative mapping, navigation & localization on the planetary surface and within the lava tube, as well as advanced locomotion capabilities needed, for example, to enter the lava tube through the vertical skylight. In addition, a fully functional scientific sensor (GPR) was used to demonstrate scientific investigation of the lunar surface in a realistic way.
