Proprioceptive swarms for celestial body exploration

Abstract

The exploration of small celestial bodies has been a very active field ever since the dawn of space exploration. However, traditional approaches based on monolithic landers allow only the area in the immediate vicinity to the landing spot to be examined. Using mobile systems like rovers allow for better coverage, but at considerable cost and complexity. In this work, we propose an approach based on swarms of small nonmaneuverable agents, equipped with a sensor package, that are launched from a base station and made to land across the entire surface of the asteroid or comet. The methodology is based on multilateration using small range-finding radio frequency sensors aboard the agents; this enables position determination relative to the base station. Through dynamics simulation, we show that this approach is feasible even in highly irregular gravity fields where closed-form solutions for orbital mechanics are not available, such as the case of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. We show a sensitivity analysis of the absolute position error of the agents which originated from range-measurement error. The surface coverage is evaluated against the numerosity of the swarm. Finally, we show that allowing for a subset of agents to follow a long-period orbit around the object enables better localization of the landed agents, thus increasing the overall performance.