SBIR/STTR Award attributes
NASA will use swarms of robot vehicles for future planetary exploration, including Moon explorations in support of a sustained lunar presence. Advanced robotic and autonomous systems can overcome challenges inherent in navigating extreme terrain. Other tasks, such as obtaining mineral or ice samples from a wide area of a planetary surface or exploring terrain that blocks the transmission of signals to Earth or satellites (e.g., canyons, caves, lava tubes), lend themselves to robotic systems composed of multiple vehicles working in a coordinated fashion (i.e., multi-robot swarms). In addition to sharing work across the team, these swarms can adapt to changing exploration needs, and provide resiliency to failure of single vehicles while being scalable to accept additional vehicles when needed. Charles River Analytics and the Novel Engineering for Swarm Technologies (NEST) Laboratory at Worcester Polytechnic Institute will design and demonstrate Autonomous Swarming for Teams of Exploration Robots (ASTER). We introduce three compelling innovations to swarm systems: (1) a ldquo;theory of mindrdquo; task allocation method in which robots use what they know of others to plan their own next task; (2) the extension of heterogeneity to include health and status of robots; and (3) anticipating future world state and robot health and status based on data received and knowledge about what robots are performing what tasks. ASTER will use three technologies: Task allocation algorithms informed by Charles Riverrsquo;s Swarm Coordination Framework, the Buzz swarm programming language for implementing algorithms and behaviors for physical and simulated robots, and the ARGoS multi-physics simulation engine for simulation and evaluation. We will deploy and evaluate algorithms on physical robots in real-world environments. We aim to reach TRL 6 during our Phase II effort and we will focus on the real-world utility of these algorithms to support future NASA missions.
