A hexapodal robot for maintenance operations at a future Mars base

Abstract

The development of a teleoperated, hexapodal robot suitable for maintenance work at a future Mars base is described. In order to reduce the workload on human engineers at the base, it is desirable that the machine quickly acquire the ability to carry out routine tasks without direct manual control. To function most usefully in a hostile environment, it must do this on the basis of very few training trials and in the presence of considerable sensor and motion noise. A mapless navigation task in which the robot periodically visits a circuit of waypoints around the base is selected from among several potential jobs for the maintenance robot. Simulations are used to show that a simple playback of operator commands corrected using a combination of logged non-magnetic compass and bearing to optical landmarks produces good results, and suggests that the method may be generalisable to other maintenance tasks.