An Efficient Scalable Autonomy Approach for Teams of Heterogeneous Mobile Robots

Real-world scenarios for mobile robots promise an increase in productivity and safety for humans or the exploration of new frontiers. These complex challenges, though, require tradeoffs between the efficiency of autonomous operation and the reliability of manual operator control. Additionally, when scaling towards larger scale solutions, potentially heterogeneous robot teams have to be managed together, further increasing the requirements towards the operator systems and strategies used. To assist with this, we present and implement a general, robot independent scalable autonomy approach. It allows seamless scalability between full autonomy and teleoperation and is equipped with tooling for a single operator to efficiently control a robot team. A focus on modularity allows for integration of arbitrary robots, while effectively utilizing their already existing autonomous capabilities. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, by describing its usage in the ESA-ESRIC Space Resources Challenge, which required safe operation in realistic conditions for a lunar exploration and prospecting mission. Due to the easy adaptability and scalability of our system, it can help ease control of teams of arbitrary robots both in difficult situations with a high degree of uncertainty and increase the capabilities of autonomous robots in more controlled inspection and maintenance scenarios with only little operator intervention.