The latest trends in technology miniaturization and advances in artificial intelligence are influencing the way of thinking about autonomous exploration. The mission of a UxV and its complexity determines the required degree of autonomy of the system, where a versatile autonomous exploration platform using arachnid basis instead of classic exploration vehicles can provide higher moving speeds and better landscape adaptation by overcoming relief and physical barriers. The main disadvantages of vehicle-based exploration are addressed by a nature inspired arachnid walker using latest high-performance technology to tackle the issues of complex and fully synchronous kinematic control.
Artificial Intelligence plays a major role in enabling the autonomy of exploration by guiding the exploration platform through diverse terrains with many obstacles, while route planning is often seen as a tedious and challenging task, which can be delegated to Artificial Intelligence in combination with various other algorithms for navigation using positioning and environmental sensing.
- The legged approach provides nature inspired adaptation to variety of terrains gaining advantages regarding wheel-based exploration vehicles, and therefore ideal for achieving higher level of autonomy.
- The legged robot structure by its concept is easily adaptable to different scientific applications of exploration and can be considered as a potential technological solution for future scientific exploration missions.
- The electrically powered light-weight structure driven by artificial intelligence provides capability of carrying small payloads like scientific instrumentation, and therefore ideal for autonomous scientific exploration of different surfaces.
- The light-weight design and communication capabilities enable simultaneous deployment of many legged robots to function in a swarm configuration, which increases spatial exploration capabilities in comparison to use traditionally larger exploration vehicles.
- Platform provides a distributed data handling system for fully synchronous hardware accelerated real time control of 32 degrees-of-freedom to provide nature-vise movements and locomotion.
- Simulated environment for real physical simulation can be used to test its performance and coordination, navigation, and control algorithms on different types of real or randomly generated landscapes simulating single or multiple explorers in swarm or a colony.
Overcome the main disadvantages of classic exploration with wheeled rovers and increase exploration autonomy by introducing a versatile nature inspired autonomous low-cost arachnid all-terrain crawlers