Robot work crews for planetary outposts: close cooperation and coordination of multiple mobile robots

We report on the development of cooperating multiple robots. This work builds from our earlier research on autonomous planetary revers and robot arms. Here, we seek to closely coordinate the mobility and manipulation of multiple robots to perform site construction operations-as an example, the autonomous deployment of a planetary power station-a task viewed as essential to a sustained robotic presence and human habitation on Mars. There are numerous technical challenges; these include the mobile handling of extended objects, as well as cooperative transport/navigation of such objects over natural, unpredictable terrain. We describe an extensible system concept, related simulations, a hardware implementation, and preliminary experimental results. In support of this work we have developed an enabling hybrid control architecture wherein multi-robot mobility and sensor-based controls are derived as group compositions and coordination of more basic behaviors under a task-level multi-agent planner. We summarize this Control Architecture for Multi-robot Planetary Outposts (CAMPOUT), and its application to physical experiments where two revers carry an extended payload over natural terrain.