Exploring the depths of an unmapped cave system is a daunting enough prospect in itself, but consider how dangerous it would be to do so on another planet such as Mars. , a new system is underway that uses rovers that drop “breadcrumbs” to do their jobs.
It is currently being developed by a team at the University of Arizona led by Assoc. According to Professor Wolfgang Fink, the system incorporates a ground-moving “mother” rover that carries several smaller rovers to the entrance of the cave system. Those little autonomous rovers set out separately to explore the system’s various passageways while the mother parked at the entrance.
Each rover periodically drops small wireless communication nodes, called “breadcrumbs”, to the ground as it moves down its respective corridor. They are named after the fictional breadcrumbs Hansel and Gretel used to find their way back from the Wicked Witch Forest.
To map the cave system, each small rover periodically sends and receives radio signals to and from its mother. These signals don’t travel well through solid rock, so they’re relayed from one breadcrumb to the next. Breadcrumb placement is determined by the rover, which will drop another breadcrumb as soon as it detects that the signal it is receiving is getting weaker.
signal from The small rover will contain information such as the rover’s position relative to the mother, possibly along with data collected by onboard cameras and LiDAR sensors. By processing and combining all the information from all the small rovers, the mother will be able to create a detailed computer map of her system.
Note that the little rovers are expendable and each will continue to move forward until it runs out of battery power, crumbs, or is stopped by terrain.
Wolfgang Fink/University of Arizona
In addition to being used purely in the name of scientific exploration, this technology can also be used to assess which caves and tunnels are suitable for conversion into astronaut habitat. Using existing underground structures for this purpose would probably be much easier and less expensive than building a building from scratch on the planet’s surface.
Fink and colleagues have already built a rover that works with related communication technologies, and are currently working on a breadcrumb distribution mechanism.
The study is described in a paper recently published in the journal. Advances in space research.
Source: University of Arizona
