AUTONOMOUS DECISION MAKING IN VERY LONG TRAVERSES (ADE)

On May 10th , ADE held its online Final Presentation, where REA, PSA and all the partners of the consortium reviewed all the project results, the advances w.r.t state of the art, the tests, and the conclusions.
After 27 months, ADE, a complex system of systems, was successfully developed and integrated into a demonstrator for future planetary rover exploration, the SherpaTT rover from DFKI. This demonstrator provides a solution for planetary rovers that includes onboard mission planning capabilities, scientific detection with the capability to perform serendipitous science, autonomous guidance, an FDIR system based on Formal Verification techniques, and a novel perception and localization system based on Visual Navigation. Moreover, ADE included a ground control station capable of commanding the rover at different levels of autonomy. Therefore the complexity of this system is much higher than the one for previous developments (f.i. ERGO). A parallel demonstrator, using an in-house developed rover from GMV, was aimed at a terrestrial use case: decommissioning of nuclear facilities.

The immense majority of the goals of the project have been achieved: definition of requirements, preliminary and detailed design, procurement of the SW, development of the SW and integration with the HW, preliminary and integration testing, as well as the field tests campaigns for both the planetary and the nuclear have been successful.
The impact of the Covid implied additional effort to be applied in handling uncertainties and “B plans” (delays in procurements, difficulties in traveling for integration, having to “improvise” new test sites & remote testing, etc…). This is the main reason for an increase of the global effort w.r.t the originally planned.

For the planetary, the demonstrator (Ground station + ADAM + Ground truth) fulfils the requirements, with only minor deviations, and was able to be tested remotely. For the nuclear, all tests passed nominally, and we were able to achieve all our goals
As a result of the decisions that were taken during the project, several unexpected and additional positive results were obtained: I3DS extensions, 2 separate deployments of ADAM, ground truth additional assets, additional training of the scientific agents, new Guidance modes, etc.

Forced by Covid traveling restrictions, the whole team has gained experience in remote testing. And the unexpected difficulties and problems the team had to face were solved thanks to a good team spirit of collaboration, which allowed the Team to get extraordinary results within this COVID pandemic situation.