Fault-Tolerant Coordination of Multiple Planetary Rovers

Planetary Rovers are used to explore planets and moons, collecting data and samples as their mission progresses. Recent rover missions have been based on remote control of individual rovers, which take excessively slow due to communication time delays. Two ways to improve the range and speed of rover exploration missions is to use multiple rovers and allow the rovers to guide themselves in an autonomous, coordinated manner.
The main drawback with introducing such multi-agent autonomy is the increase in the probability that a fault or faults would occur during the mission. This requires the entire system to be designed so that it is fault tolerant. This involves health monitoring of the system performance and the implementation of suitable recovery actions when a fault is detected.
The project will involve the design and development of a fault tolerant coordination system for multiple autonomous rovers. In normal operation this system will coordinate the motion of the rovers in their execution of the mission. This part of the system will be based on path planning and coordination algorithms used to guide multiple vehicles. The fault tolerant elements will then be developed to monitor the performance of the swarm and then characterise any faults based on deviations in the expected motion of the group of rovers.
This study will involve simulation studies of the rovers, the fault-tolerant coordination system and the terrain being traversed.