Excavation using decentralized swarm robots for off-earth habitation

Abstract

Civilization has progressed over time as a result of exploration of previously undiscovered portions of the Earth and the subsequent exploitation of new resources. Humans will now explore and exploit new places beyond Earth, i.e. in space, as a natural continuation of this process. The Moon has been partially investigated, but it still needs to be fully explored and colonized. Mars and beyond will be the next phase. The establishment of outposts on these new space bodies will be necessary before they can be habited. But these extraterrestrial constructions are expensive, time-consuming, and risky. In this article building habitations by excavation is suggested and proven to be more convenient. Having many challenges in the physical excavation tasks, only a few researchers have been trying to innovate and improve excavation-related technologies. Amongst these, some have proposed adopting robotics in the aspects of excavation in the construction process but none has been tested practically. In our work, we try to introduce a novel approach for excavation using swarm robotics. Behaviour of a robotic swarm is collective and aimed at solving a problem using the collective conduct. This is similar to the natural animal swarm behaviour of bees/ ants/ termites...etc. Even though there are many researches and developments done in the field of swarm robotics, the concept has not yet made its way into industrial environments. In order to colonize planets and moons, it is required to build a surface structure which needs to be a few meters thick to protect living beings from solar/cosmic radiation, meteoroid impacts, and extreme temperature variations. However, creating a structure with thickness of a few meters has been a research challenge for many decades due to practical limitations of developing them on off-earth. This research proposes our approach Cave Construction using Swarm Robots acronymed as CCSR, a practical method to excavate the ground to create subsurface habitats using decentralized robot swarms. Our CCSR design uses vision, RFID, and orientation sensor data to decide actioneeded to be taken by the robot. Robots can do basic actions such as traversing, removing, and dumping regolith. The swarm consists of a set of robots that are practical to implement, with limited visibility and limited communication skills. Having only the local view of the terrain, robots in the swarm excavate a given shape in 3D in collaboration with the other robots in the swarm. With the application of swarm concepts in an improved manner, the swarm is able to construct the given shape through excavation, displaying true parallelism which in turn will improve the construction time.