The ARCHES Moon-Analogue Demonstration Mission: Towards Teams of Autonomous Robots for Collaborative Scientific Sampling in Lunar Environments

Teams of mobile robots will play a crucial role in future missions to explore the surface of the Moon. Setting up infrastructure and taking scientific samples are expensive tasks when operating in such distant, challenging, and unknown environments. In contrast to current single-robot space missions, future heterogeneous robotic teams will increase efficiency via enhanced autonomy and parallelization, improve robustness via functional redundancy, as well as benefit from complementary capabilities of the individual robots. We present our heterogeneous robotic team, consisting of flying and driving robots that we plan to deploy on scientific sampling demonstration missions at a Moon-analogue site on Mt. Etna, Sicily, Italy in 2021 as part of the ARCHES project. We give a brief description of the robots' complementary capabilities and present their roles in two mission scenarios.