9th Robotics Forum at Fachhochschule Dortmund

Our natural Earth companion has fascinated mankind since we first turned our eyes skywards. Besides its mystical qualities, the Moon has always been our first destination when new technologies allowed us to take a closer look into space - from the development of the telescope to manned spaceflight.

In this talk, we explore the history of lunar exploration and why the Moon has recently come back into the focus of space exploration - with a variety of new and future lunar missions.

Exploring extraterrestrial bodies with robots is a challenging task. For example, the robot must operate in an unknown environment without a global positioning system to tell it exactly where it is. Teleoperating the robot is not an option in most cases due to the low bandwidth and high latency of the communication channel. As a result, the robot has to perform a variety of different tasks autonomously. Robot teams can help to break down the challenging task into smaller subtasks, which can then be assigned to a specific robot team member who specializes in that task.

At the German Aerospace Center (DLR), we are building such a robot team for future planetary exploration missions. This presentation will introduce the robot team, which consists of two rovers and a flying robot. In addition, an overview of a selection of current projects in the field of planetary robotics at DLR will be given.

We will take a closer look at our projects such as ARCHES. We will also explore how this technology that we have developed in the field of planetary robotics exploration can also help us right here on Earth and how we can use the knowledge for future space missions.

Robots are increasingly expanding their presence beyond the controlled environments of laboratories and moving into dynamic settings. In such environments, perception is a crucial capability. In addition to localization and obstacle avoidance, object-oriented perception is an important issue for manipulation. Artificial intelligence has made significant progress in this area and enabled impressive developments. However, these methods have difficulties with generalization, such as dealing with unknown objects, and implementing robustness in real robotic systems.

This presentation highlights different modules of object-oriented perception and explores strategies for navigating in ever-changing environments.

The MMX rover will explore the surface of Phobos, the larger moon of Mars. It will use its stereo cameras to perceive the environment to enable the use of autonomous navigation algorithms based on image processing. The German Aerospace Center (DLR) is currently developing the corresponding autonomous navigation that will allow the rover to efficiently explore the surface of Phobos, despite limited communication with Earth and long response times for operations.

In this talk, we will give a brief overview of the mission, present our navigation pipeline and discuss the tests.