Evaluating the Response of a Network of Autonomous Robots to Emergency Scenarios Inside a Lunar Base

NASA’s Artemis mission intends to return humans to the surface of the Moon. Beyond lunar surface exploration, the plan envisions setting up semi-permanent bases to explore, prospect for resources and set the stage for living off the lunar surface. However, the lunar surface poses major challenges for astronauts as it is exposed to solar and cosmic radiation, undergoes extreme temperature swings between day and night, and maybe bombarded by micrometeorites. All of these factors suggest limiting astronaut exposure to the lunar surface environment, and instead, a credible plan would be to offload the dull, dirty, and dangerous tasks to a team of autonomous robots. We envision a lunar base as a facility evolved from the current International Space Station, with robotics playing an integral role in operating the base. The base would consist of modular, interlocking cylindrical pressurized units that house living and working quarters to science laboratories and logistics storage facilities. A critical need for these autonomous robots is to handle emergencies that could be life-or-death situations for astronauts and, if not quickly managed, could result in the loss of an entire lunar base. We envision that robots could move throughout the pressurized chambers by running along a rail track mounted onto the ceiling of the pressurized units. The network of robots will handle dull, dirty, and dangerous tasks so astronauts can focus on priority science and exploration tasks. The tasks included asset management, cleaning, repair, maintenance, and handling emergency scenarios, to name a few. Emergency scenarios include the accumulation of smoke, fire, and toxic chemical residue that humans would otherwise not sense. Through our studies, we are investigating multiple emergency response tactics, including (a) fast initial response, (b) utilization of emergency investigative and forecasting tools to perform a measured response, (c) evacuation first tactic, and (d) overwhelming first response. These strategies will be evaluated in addition to other combinations to see what strategy is advantageous under what conditions. For these scenarios, we consider and compare a (a) single robot, (b) multiple robot configurations, including a team of non-modular robots, limited modularity with the ability to house specialized emergency kits, (c) modular robots that can be interconnected to form robots’ chains or aggregate robot configurations. We then compare these different robot configurations regarding how well they handle and mitigate emergency scenarios. We hypothesize that a chaining approach is most valuable in these emergency scenarios. Under certain circumstances, the system may need to operate as a bucket brigade to transport resources to a certain location as the source of the emergency. Important simulation findings will then be recreated with real robots in a laboratory environment. The real robot simulations intend to understand the scenario's plausibility better and provide confidence in the simulation results.