Mapping marsian caves in 2D with a small exploratory robot

Abstract

The caves in Mars are a safe habitat for a colony of human explorers and provide valuable information for the scientists. Unfortunately, the interiors of these caves are not known enough, but nowadays investigators have proposed to send Multi-robot teams for exploration of this subsurface. This article supports this initiative developing exploratory robots specialized in mapping. We worked with the hardware Rasperry-Pi 3, DFRduino Romeo and RPLidarA1 in addition, and with the softwares Matlab, Hector_SLAM-ROS, Ubuntu 14.04. There was information obtained from the sensor which is processed by ROS and that information was exported in a file. dat to smooth the map 2D in Matlab.