Enhanced Lunar Mission Control System for Supervising and Controlling Unmanned Rovers with Extended Reality
Combining collaborative 3D mapping and extended reality to support mission planning and supervisory control of multi-robot exploration at the lunar south pole.
- Principal Investigator
- Assoc. Prof. Miguel Angel Olivares Mendez
- Funding
- FNR – AFR
- Researchers
- Alexandre Frantz
Overview
Future lunar missions will deploy teams of robots to explore unknown and hazardous terrain, support in-situ resource utilization (ISRU) activities, and enable infrastructure development. Supervising these systems requires operators to maintain situational awareness across multiple robots in an unfamiliar environment. At the lunar south pole, extreme lighting conditions, hazardous terrain, and limited terrain observations make it difficult to fully assess the rovers' surroundings and plan operations from sparse images and separate robot data alone.
ELYSIUM-XR investigates how online 3D reconstruction can support mission planning and supervisory control of multi-robot systems for planetary exploration, with a direct focus on the lunar south pole. This PhD research aims to combine observations from multiple exploring robots into a shared, continuously updated 3D terrain representation. LiDAR-based reconstruction provides detailed terrain geometry under challenging illumination, allowing operators to inspect newly explored areas and adapt mission plans as information becomes available.
Research Objectives
Collaborative Mapping and Online Surface Reconstruction
The project brings together collaborative mapping and online surface reconstruction to combine observations from multiple exploring robots into a shared view of the terrain. This continuously updated representation is intended to help operators understand newly explored areas and identify hazards as the mission progresses.
Interactive Mission Control in Extended Reality
An extended reality (XR) system will connect the reconstructed terrain with interactive mission control, helping operators understand their surroundings, plan operations, and coordinate robot activities during multi-robot exploration.
Evaluation in Simulation and the LunaLab
The approach will be evaluated in simulation and in SpaceR's LunaLab analogue facility. Evaluation will consider reconstruction quality, system performance under realistic operational constraints, and effectiveness in supporting operators during multi-robot exploration.
Project Information
- Project number: 18809546
- Main supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Miguel Angel Olivares Mendez
- Researcher: Alexandre Frantz
- CET committee: Miguel Angel Olivares Mendez, Malte Langosz, Carol Martinez Luna
- Partners: None