PhD Talk: Efficient motion planning for mobile manipulation in planetary exploration.

Space is the main unknown that bounds human understanding and technology progression. Exploring space is difficult, costly and dangerous, hence robotics arise as the most suitable alternative. In particular, planetary exploration vehicles, also called rovers, have become the best option to carry scientific instruments that gather information of extraterrestrial surfaces like Mars or the Moon. These instruments are generally held by a robotic arm, allowing the rover to perform manipulation tasks such as extracting and analyzing Mars soil samples or performing scientific measurements on the surface. Nevertheless, it is critical to perform these tasks autonomously to increase the scientific return of the mission, avoiding the limitations caused by remote teleoperation from Earth. Even more for time constrained missions like Sample Fetch Rover (SFR), which demand higher average navigation speed, thus higher efficiency and autonomy levels.

Hereby, in this talk I will give an overview of the research I have conducted during my PhD, which aims at increasing the level of autonomy of mobile manipulators by planning efficient motions for the system (mobile platform + manipulator) in a coupled way. Additionally, I will introduce my ongoing work about how mobile manipulation is applied to multi-robot lunar caves exploration within the CoRob-X project, which is the origin of my binational doctorate and the link that brought me to DFKI.