More robots will be used in exploring the caves on the Red Planet. Researchers at the University of Arizona, College of Engineering, have developed a technology involving flocks or robots to explore Mars and probably other worlds.
New Technology Inspired by Hansel and Gretel's Breadcrumb Trick
Wolfgang Fink, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UArizona, talked about a communication network that would link rovers, lake landers, and other submersible vehicles through a mesh topology network to allow them to work independently as a team without human input.
Fink said the approach addresses one of NASA's Space Technology Grand Challenges like the limited ability to safely traverse the environment on Mars, Moons, comets, and asteroids. In a nod to the popular fairytale story Hansel and Gretel, the team called the technology the "Breadcrumb-Style Dynamically Deployed Communication Network" paradigm or DDCN, Science Daily reported.
In the famous Grimm's fairytale, clever Hansel dropped breadcrumbs to ensure they would find their way home after being abandoned in a forest. For their research, Fink, founder and director of the Visual and Autonomous Exploration Systems Research Laboratory at Caltech and UArizona, said the breadcrumbs are miniaturized sensors that piggyback on the rovers, which deploy sensors as they travel and explore a cave or subsurface environment.
The rovers are connected through a wireless data connection, and when the rover senses that the signal is fading, it will drop a communication node regardless of the distance since it passed its last node.
Fink called it an opportunistic deployment because they only deploy "breadcrumbs" when necessary. The system works in two ways, the mother rover will receive and collect the data transmitted by the subordinate rovers exploring the area. The mother rover can also orchestrate and control the rovers like a puppet master.
How Does the Breadcrumb-Style Dynamically Deployed Communication Network Work
The team's vision is to have a team of robots operating at different commands with a mother rover. Some space missions have already practiced this, like the Perseverance rover commanding Ingenuity, a robot helicopter.
However, the breadcrumb technique, a.k.a. DDCN, takes it to the next level by providing a robust platform so robots can explore various environments underground or submerged in oceans.
The DDCN concept will allow rovers to operate without losing contact with the mother rover on the surface. Once deployed, the sensors will automatically establish a nondirected mesh network, and each node will update itself about the node around it.
According to Mark Tarbell, paper co-author and senior research scientist in Fink's laboratory, the nodes can switch and compensate for dead spots and signal blackouts. And if some die, there will still be connectivity through the remaining nodes that are still operating. The mother node will have a guaranteed connection to the farthest node in the network.
However, they are designed to be expendable, according to Fink. The design will not waste resources in retrieving the robots back. According to Fink, they can go as far as possible and be left behind once their mission is fulfilled.
Dirk Schulze-Makuch, president of the German Astrobiological Society and author of many publications on extraterrestrial life, is hopeful that the new paper will allow the exploration of Martian lava tube caves and subsurface oceans of the icy moons where extraterrestrial life might be present.
The study is published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Advances in Space Research.
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