Hansel and Gretel's breadcrumb trick inspires robotic exploration of
caves on Mars and beyond

Date:
March 1, 2023
Source:
University of Arizona
Summary:
Future space missions likely will send robots to scout out
underground habitats for astronauts. Engineers have now developed
a system that would enable autonomous vehicles to explore caves,
lava tubes and even oceans on other worlds on their own.


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FULL STORY ========================================================================== House hunting on Mars could soon become a thing, and researchers at
the University of Arizona are already in the business of scouting real
estate that future astronauts could use as habitats. Researchers in the UArizona College of Engineering have developed technology that would allow
a flock of robots to explore subsurface environments on other worlds.


========================================================================== "Lava tubes and caves would make perfect habitats for astronauts because
you don't have to build a structure; you are shielded from harmful
cosmic radiation, so all you need to do is make it pretty and cozy,"
said Wolfgang Fink, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UArizona.

Fink is lead author of a new paper in Advances in Space Research that
details a communication network that would link rovers, lake landers and
even submersible vehicles through a so-called mesh topology network,
allowing the machines to work together as a team, independently from
human input. According to Fink and his co-authors, the approach could
help address one of NASA's Space Technology Grand Challenges by helping overcome the limited ability of current technology to safely traverse environments on comets, asteroids, moons and planetary bodies. In a
nod to the fairy tale "Hansel and Gretel," the researchers named their patent-pending concept the "Breadcrumb-Style Dynamically Deployed
Communication Network" paradigm, or DDCN.

A fairy tale inspires the future "If you remember the book, you know
how Hansel and Gretel dropped breadcrumbs to make sure they'd find their
way back," said Fink, founder and director of the Visual and Autonomous Exploration Systems Research Laboratory at Caltech and UArizona. "In our scenario, the 'breadcrumbs' are miniaturized sensors that piggyback on
the rovers, which deploy the sensors as they traverse a cave or other subsurface environment." Continuously monitoring their environment and maintaining awareness of where they are in space, the rovers proceed
on their own, connected to each other via a wireless data connection,
deploying communication nodes along the way. Once a rover senses the
signal is fading but still within range, it drops a communication node, regardless of how much distance has actually passed since it placed the
last node.

"One of the new aspects is what we call opportunistic deployment --
the idea that you deploy the 'breadcrumbs' when you have to and not
according to a previously planned schedule," Fink said.

All the while, there is no need for input from the mother rover;
each subordinate rover will make that determination on its own, Fink
added. The system can work in one of two ways, Fink explained. In one,
the mother rover acts as a passive recipient, collecting data transmitted
by the rovers doing the exploration. In the other, the mother rover acts
as the orchestrator, controlling the rovers' moves like a puppet master.

Machines take over The new concept dovetails with the tier-scalable reconnaissance paradigm devised by Fink and colleagues in the early
2000s. This idea envisions a team of robots operating at different
command levels -- for example, an orbiter controlling a blimp, which
in turn controls one or more landers or rovers on the ground. Already,
space missions have embraced this concept, several with participation
by UArizona researchers. For example, on Mars, the Perseverance rover is commanding Ingenuity, a robotic helicopter. A concept for another mission, which ultimately was not selected for funding, proposed sending an orbiter carrying a balloon and a lake lander to study one of the hydrocarbon
seas on Saturn's moon Titan. The breadcrumb approach takes the idea one
step further by providing a robust platform allowing robotic explorers
to operate underground or even submerged in liquid environments. Such
swarms of individual, autonomous robots could also aid in search and
rescue efforts in the wake of natural disasters on Earth, Fink said.

Fink said the biggest challenge, apart from getting the rovers inside
the subsurface environment in the first place, is to retrieve the data
they record underground and bring it back to the surface. The DDCN
concept allows a team of rovers to navigate even convoluted underground environments without ever losing contact to their "mother rover" on the surface. Outfitted with a light detection and ranging system, or lidar,
they could even map out cave passages in all three dimensions, not unlike
the drones that can be seen exploring an alien spacecraft in the movie "Prometheus." "Once deployed, our sensors automatically establish a nondirected mesh network, which means each node updates itself about
each node around it," said Fink, who first detailed the DDCN concept in
a proposal to NASA in 2019.

"They can switch between each other and compensate for dead spots
and signal blackouts," added Mark Tarbell, paper co-author and senior
research scientist in Fink's laboratory. "If some of them die, there
still is connectivity through the remaining nodes, so the mother rover
never loses connection to the farthest node in the network." Mission of
no return The robust network of communication nodes ensures all the data collected by the robotic explorers make it back to the mother rover on
the surface. Therefore, there is no need to retrieve the robots once
they have done their job, said Fink, who published the idea of using
groups of expendable mobile robotic surface probes as early as 2014.

"They're designed to be expendable," he said. "Instead of wasting
resources to get them into the cave and back out, it makes more sense
to have them go as far as they possibly can and leave them behind once
they have fulfilled their mission, run out of power or succumbed to a
hostile environment." "The communication network approach introduced
in this new paper has the potential to herald a new age of planetary
and astrobiological discoveries," said Dirk Schulze-Makuch, president
of the German Astrobiological Society and author of many publications
on extraterrestrial life. "It finally allows us to explore Martian
lava tube caves and the subsurface oceans of the icy moons - - places
where extraterrestrial life might be present." The proposed concept
"holds magic," according to Victor Baker, a UArizona Regents Professor
of Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences, Geosciences and Planetary
Sciences."The most amazing discoveries in science come about when advances
in technology provide both first-time access to a thing or place and the
means of communicating what is thereby discovered to creative minds that
are seeking understanding," Baker said.

Exploring hidden ocean worlds In places that call for submersible
robots, the system could consist of a lander -- either floating on
a lake, as might be the case on Titan, or sitting on the ice atop a
subsurface ocean like on Europa -- that is connected to the submarine,
for example through a long cable. Here the communication nodes would act
as repeaters, boosting the signal in regular intervals to prevent it from degrading. Importantly, Fink pointed out, the nodes have the capabilities
to gather data themselves -- for example measuring pressure, salinity, temperature and other chemical and physical parameters -- and to ingest
the data into the cable connecting back to the lander.

"Imagine you make it all the way to Europa, you melt your way through
miles of ice, make it down to the subsurface ocean, where you find
yourself surrounded by alien life, but you have no way of getting data
back to the surface," he said. "That's the scenario we need to avoid."
Having developed the rovers and the communication technology, Fink's
group is now working on building the actual mechanism by which the rovers
would deploy the communication nodes.

"Basically, we're going to teach our 'Hansels' and 'Gretels' how to
drop the breadcrumbs so they add up to a functioning mesh communication network," Fink said.

* RELATED_TOPICS
o Space_&_Time
# Space_Exploration # NASA # Mars
o Matter_&_Energy
# Engineering # Robotics_Research # Nature_of_Water
o Computers_&_Math
# Robotics # Computers_and_Internet #
Artificial_Intelligence
* RELATED_TERMS
o Exploration_of_Mars o Robotic_surgery o Humanoid_robot o
Industrial_robot o Space_exploration o European_Space_Agency
o NASA o Robot

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by University_of_Arizona. Original
written by Daniel Stolte.

Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Wolfgang Fink, Connor Fuhrman, Andres Nuncio Zuniga, Mark Tarbell. A
Hansel & Gretel Breadcrumb-Style Dynamically Deployed Communication
Network Paradigm using Mesh Topology for Planetary Subsurface
Exploration. Advances in Space Research, 2023; DOI: 10.1016/
j.asr.2023.02.012 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/03/230301185225.htm

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