Asteroid wide-area exploration system using plural small rovers and relative distance estimation

This paper presents a new robot system consisting of plural small size rovers for an asteroid wide-area exploration. After the rovers land and scatter on an asteroid, they communicate each other using radio and make a wireless mesh network on the asteroid´s surface. When the rover communicates another ones, RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator) can be obtained at the same time. Although a CPU installed in the rovers cannot perform complex calculation, all the RSSI values are sent to Earth and relative distances among the rovers are estimated based on the RSSIs. Our proposed system has the following three advantages against a conventional exploration system using one or two rovers: (1) It is possible to explore a wider area of an asteroid. (2) Since the mesh network has redundant communication paths, it has more robustness against some troubles. (3) The relative distance estimation is useful for asteroid analyses using sensors that rovers have. In this paper, we describe that the concept of our proposed robot system, the relative distance estimation method based on the genetic algorithm and some simulation results.