The Valles Marineris Explorer (VaMEx) initiative of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) will develop and demonstrate the technology for a swarm of heterogeneous and autonomous explorers on Earth that will eventually explore the surface of Mars in search of liquid water and signs of life. The swarm consists of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), each of which is designed for a specific task. When one explorer identifies a region that another one is better equipped to explore, they autonomously exchange this information and adjust the exploration plan accordingly. For this a robust, absolute positioning system is needed. To achieve this, multiple different sensors are fused together, one of which is a radio-positioning system, that will be presented in this work. It uses ultra wideband (UWB)-localization to measure distances between the swarm members and stationary, deployable nodes. During the mission, the stationary nodes are distributed in interesting regions. After there deployment, they measure the distances to themselves and construct a coordinate system using multidimensional scaling (MDS). Afterwards, the swarm members can determine their own position by measuring the distances to the stationary nodes. The foundation for the radio-localization system are distance measurements between the nodes following the double-sided two-way-ranging (DS-TWR) scheme.


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    Title :

    UWB Localization for Martian Swarm Exploration


    Contributors:

    Publication date :

    2023-01-01



    Type of media :

    Paper


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



    Classification :

    DDC:    000 / 620 / 629




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