The decontamination of legacy nuclear or other hazardous waste sites is a critical task that exposes human workers to significant risks. This paper presents a robotic system designed to mitigate human exposure by enabling remote, operator-supervised soil sampling using a retrofitted industrial walking excavator. Our integrated approach allows a single operator at a safe distance to supervise the entire soil sampling mission, from site mapping to task execution.The system’s architecture seamlessly combines (1) a cloud-based SLAM framework for generating consistent and accessible site maps; (2) a software stack for traversability estimation and navigation, enabling robust mobility in unstructured terrain; and (3) a shared autonomy manipulation framework where the operator designates a target and the robot autonomously executes the complex, safety-critical soil sampling motion.This paper outlines the system design and reports on the successful validation of its core components. In a local testbed designed to simulate hazardous waste sites, we validated several key systems on the semi-autonomous excavator: the cloud-based SLAM pipeline, local 3D reconstruction for real-time environment modeling, intuitive Cartesian control of the end-effector, the autonomous sampling workflow, and the navigation stack. Field experiments subsequently validated all necessary components for the complete sampling workflow, demonstrating the viability of our shared autonomy approach and establishing a promising foundation for future field deployment.

This study evaluates the feasibility of a robotic exploration mission to a skylight located in the Marius Hills region on Moon. The study is based on theoretical evaluations while making use of existing results from previous and currently running projects. Parts of the approach were already evaluated by autonomously navigating and mapping in a lava tube and other field trials in analogue environments. We address a solution to access and map a lunar lava tube with a semi-autonomous heterogenous team of exploration rovers. Main systems are: 1) a surface rover, which serves as anchoring point, communication relay and power generator, 2) a highly mobile exploration micro rover foreseen to rappel down into the skylight for tube exploration and 3) a tether management and docking system which can be attached to the exploration rover to safely lower it into the lava tube and serve as power and communication hub during cave exploration. For descending we propose a rappelling approach using tethering and actively controlled hybrid legged-wheels on the exploration rover. The rover uses path planning to avoid obstacles on its way down the vertical surface. When the bottom of the skylight is reached, the tether spool is deployed as docking station. After successful deployment, different autonomy levels are possible -from remote-controlled to fully autonomous- to explore the unknown environment.

Robots and industrial vehicles are becoming more and more autonomous. Currently, the robots are not able to carry out all tasks autonomously, but the number of those tasks is increasing. Semi- autonomous robots are changing the requirements of control stations for their surveillance and control. These new technologies will provide the possibility to have a single operator command and supervise multiple (semi-) autonomous systems. This requires new control stations, which support remote control and also commanding autonomous actions, like executing a movement command to a specific position. Here, we provide a concept that combines classic and future control stations, that can already be used with the current state of the art in robotics.

We present an approach to control a semi-autonomous robot team remotely under low bandwidth conditions with a single operator. Our approach utilises virtual reality and autonomous robots to create an immersive user interface for multi-robot control. This saves a big amount of bandwidth, just because there is no need to transfer a constant steam of camera images. The virtual environment for control only has to be transferred once to the control station and only has to be updated when the map is out of date. Also, the camera position can easily be changed in virtual reality for more overview on the robots situation. The parts of this approach can easily be transferred to applications on earth e.g. for semi-autonomous robots in hazardous areas or under water applications.

In robotic space missions, different challenges like high latency, unknown environments or bad visual conditions make it hard for the operators to plan and execute the mission. We present our mission control using virtual reality to remotely execute a sample-return mission in the field via satellite.

This paper presents the evaluation of a heterogeneous robotic team for planetary exploration purposes. An extensive test campaign with a duration of four weeks was conducted in October/November 2016 in the desert of Utah, USA. The employed robotic systems were tested on natural and unstructured Mars analogue terrain and remotely operated from a control station in Bremen, Germany. The paper details the performed system tests as well as the conducted cooperative mission sequences in the scope of a sample return mission. Furthermore, the planning and preparation of the field trial campaign as well as the infrastructure set-up in Utah and Bremen and the test execution are presented with regard to lessons learned in the field and at the control center in Bremen.

We present an approach to climb crater walls using the six-legged robot CREX (CRater EXplorer). The control architecture consists of a motion execution engine, a mapper, and a locomotion planner which maintains stability when climbing the crater wall.

Lunar and planetary craters and caves are of special scientific interest and have the potential to provide shelter for human habitats. Robots could provide the means to explore these difficult environments. A number of challenges are involved with the exploration: The robots have to be highly mobile to negotiate the difficult terrain, and need to perform most of their task autonomously, especially in caves lacking radio communication. This paper gives an overview of the Entern project and the associated goals and challenges. This includes the research of technologies for operations, environment representation and navigation. Special emphasis is put into the development of on-board simulation, to improve the reliability and the operational envelope of the robots. Further, a description of evaluation scenarios in relevant earth analogue environments is provided.

Communication methods in modern robotic systems typically connect multiple sensors, actuators, microcontrollers, and embedded PCs. There are several ways in hard-and software to communicate inside and between robots. In many cases a communication middleware is used. Although a lot of middleware solutions are available, they either introduce communication overhead or are designed and optimized for a specific domain other than robotics. But robots also have very specific requirements that have to be taken into account. This paper introduces a concept for a communication middleware that is specialized for robotics which provides a failure-tolerant communication middleware that can communicate transparently with different kinds of communication hardware.

The LUNARES (Lunar Crater Exploration Scenario) project emulates the retrieval of a scientific sample from within a permanently shadowed lunar crater by means of a heterogeneous robotic system. For the accomplished earth demonstration scenario, the Shakelton crater at the lunar south pole is taken as reference. In the areas of permanent darkness within this crater, samples of scientific interest are expected. For accomplishment of such kind of mission, an approach of a heterogeneous robotic team consisting of a wheeled rover, a legged scout as well as a robotic arm mounted on the landing unit was chosen. All robots act as a team to reach the mission goal. To prove the feasibility of the chosen approach, an artificial lunar crater environment has been established to test and demonstrate the capabilities of the robotic systems. Figure 1 depicts the systems in the artificial crater environment. For LUNARES, preexisting robots were used and modified were needed in order to integrate all subsystems into a common system control. A ground control station has been developed considering conditions of a real mission, requiring information of autonomous task execution and remote controlled operations to be displayed for human operators. The project successfully finished at the end of 2009. This paper reviews the achievements and lessons learned during the project.

In this paper, we present the SpaceClimber integration study, a six-legged, bio-inspired, energy-efficient, and adaptable free-climbing robot for mobility in steep gradients. The long-term vision is to provide a system for the purpose of extraterrestrial surface exploration missions paying special attention to mobility in lunar craters in order to retrieve or analyze scientific samples from the interior of these craters. We present an envisaged mission for SpaceClimber and give a description of the system¿s morphology and the design steps. Apart from hardware design, parts of the control software as well as the utilization of evolutionary algorithms for both morphology design and locomotion control are presented.

In the project LUNARES (LUNAR Exploration Szenario), a technology demonstration of reconfigurable cooperating robots in extraterrestrial sample return missions is implemented using state-of-the-art robotic technologies. A reconfigurable robot team consisting of a lander equipped with a manipulator, a rover, and a climbing robot is tested and demonstrated in a lunar crater test environment at the DFKI Laboratories. The aim is to accomplish a sample return mission from an (artificial) lunar crater in an autonomous way. To achieve the aim, the existing robotic technologies have to be enhanced in different areas such as locomotion in rough terrain, autonomy, and cooperation. The work is in progress, in this paper we present the current state of the development. The project is funded by the German Space Agency (DLR) and the Investment Association Bremen (BIG). LUNARES is a cooperation between the DFKI GmbH, EADS Astrium GmbH, and OHB-System AG.

Recently there was a growing interest in the applicability of walking robots for sample return missions especially in the context of space missions. Samples found in hazardous terrain are of particular scientific interest, especially walking robots have a high degree of mobility in such environments.In this paper we present the six-legged robot Scarabaeus, which is prepared to demonstrate such a mission using its custom-made claw. We present the robot itself, the method of sample detection as well as the use of piezo-electric elements attached to the claw for the detection of a successful grasp.

In multi agent environments or systems equipped with artificial intelligence it is often difficult to obtain the function or method which led to a particular behavior that is noticeable from outside. However, this information is crucial if not necessary to optimize the agents behavior. In the RoboCup 3D simulation league this dilemma becomes obvious when replaying logfiles of a game that was simulated before. The 3D soccer simulation league monitor (rcssmonitor-lite) is restricted with regards to replaying logfiles.This paper describes the concept and the implementation of improvements for the logplaying and analyzing abilities of the monitor. The idea is to provide a tool that is able to assist developers to detect problems of their agents both in single and cooperation mode.

This paper presents a servo-based four-legged robot — named AIMEE — for the RoboCup Rescue competition.

In this paper, we present our application for RoboC We introduce two autonomous walking robot systems: AIM PION. Both are based on a biomimetic approach, which will b briefly. Furthermore, all necessary technical data for our partic