Swarmathon: A Swarm Robotics Experiment For Future Space Exploration

A human mission to Mars has been the subject of science fiction, aerospace engineering, and scientific proposals since the 19th century. The plans comprise proposals to land on Mars, eventually settling on and terraforming the planet, while utilizing its moons, Phobos and Deimos. Successful exploration of Mars and its moons requires the location and retrieval of local resources on extraplanetary surfaces. Technologies are needed to find and collect materials such as ice (convertible into liquid water, hydrogen fuel and oxygen to support human life) and rocks, minerals and construction materials to build human shelters. This is referred to as In-situ resource utilization (ISRU). Swarm robotics is an approach to the coordination of multiple robots as a system which consists of large numbers of mostly simple physical robots. It is supposed that a desired collective behavior emerges from the interactions between the robots and interactions of robots with the environment. This technology presents the potential to dramatically improve the ability for robots to efficiently locate, identify and collect resources over large and previously explored territory and further ISRU efforts. In an effort to encourage the study and development of this technology, in 2016, the Swarmathon competition project was created from a cooperative agreement between the NASA Minority University Research and Education Program (MUREP) and the University of New Mexico (UNM) in partnership with the NASA KSC Swamp Works. This annual competition is designed to engage students in developing cooperative robotic algorithms to revolutionize space exploration. This paper describes the ongoing activities and the educational benefits the Swarmathon competition brings to our students at the University of Houston Clear Lake (UHCL) as a continuing participant.