exploration vehicle engineers

Abstract: Future planetary exploration missions require teams of robots to collaboratively map unknown environments under severe communication limits, constrained onboard computation, and no central infrastructure. In this field report, we present SKiD-SLAM, a distributed multi-robot LiDAR simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system for such environments, and report its deployment across two mission concepts: cave exploration and scientific surface exploration. We survey the communication and computation budgets of actual planetary missions and select modules that fit these budgets for inter-robot place recognition, relative pose estimation, and distributed trajectory fusion. Before field deployment, we verify the assembled system on public datasets resembling planetary environments and in a simulator built on NASA JPL's Open Source Rover. We then validate SKiD-SLAM through field deployments in South Korea: a team of wheeled rovers explores the Majang lava-tube cave on Jeju Island, and quadruped robots carry out a crater-and-rock science scenario on a planetary analog terrain at the Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology (KICT) in Yeoncheon. Across both deployments, SKiD-SLAM reliably performed distributed multi-robot LiDAR SLAM within a 250 kbps inter-robot communication budget, demonstrating its feasibility under challenging field conditions. Supplementary materials, including code and field data, are available at https://sparolab.github.io/research/skid_slam/.