The overall goal of the project is to develop and validate robust, scalable, and long-term-viable navigation and coordination solutions for heterogeneous robotic swarms in Mars-like exploration scenarios. These solutions are intended to enable reliable autonomous navigation in unstructured environments, even without access to external sources such as GNSS or high-resolution maps.
Key aspects here include the heterogeneous nature of the swarm and thus the individual capabilities of the systems as they contribute to the team as well as the navigation capabilities of the individual swarm members and those of the swarm as a whole. This requires reliable, adaptive, and innovative technological solutions for navigation as a central prerequisite for operating autonomous robotic systems safely and efficiently, even in complex and highly unpredictable operational environments. The VaMEx-ARES project addresses a wide range of such innovative technologies, including cooperative simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), radio-based distance and angle measurements, 360-degree image matching, radar-based speed-over-ground estimation, UAV navigation, cost map modeling, autonomous robotic behavior, context-based task coordination, and cooperative maneuver planning. These are to be used and validated in several large-scale trials.
Partners
Universität Bremen Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg Technische Universität Braunschweig Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen
