The goal of the research project IMPERA is the development of strategies for distributed mission and task planning. An application example is the exploration of unknown, lunar environment using a team of mobile robots. The planning refers to mobile, distributed and heterogeneous robots. One sub goal is the development of a standardized and modular task planning architecture which is running on the systems directly without the need of dedicated infrastructure.
The IMPERA software architecture will be augmented with different planning modules during the project and the usability will be verified using real robot systems. The different task execution strategies are developed and iteratively tested in simulation environment. The verification and deployment of the planning modules will be achieved in an extraterrestrial setting using a team of heterogeneous robots. The usability of the IMPERA architecture will be verified in the following scenarios:
• Dynamic sensor and communication coverage in the context of lunar exploration
• Planning with restricted resources like energy and storage
• Distributed exploration with the use of heterogeneous robots
• Inspection and maintenance of lunar infrastructure
• Transfer between spatial and symbolic representation (semantic perception)
The transfer between the spatial and semantic domain is an important issue in order to be able to plan on a symbolic level. Robots perceive the environment with sensors in the spatial domain, e.g. laser generated 3D point clouds. One part of the project deals with the classification of spatial data in order to allow symbolic planning. For the above mentioned planning problems specific planning modules will be developed and integrated in the IMPERA planning architecture. All planning problems are dealt with in a multi-robot context and executed on real robot systems.
Partners
Distributed Systems Group, University of Kassel
