Opportunisti Adaptation in Spa e-Based Robot Colonies: Appli ation to Site Preparation

A ne essary pre ursor to the human exploration of Mars is a ontinuously operating robot olony that an fun tion su essfully over a period of years. Su h a robot olony would be useful not only in in reasing our knowledge about Mars, but also in paving the way for human exploration by deploying the infrastru ture needed to support humans. For these robot olonies to be su essful over a long period of time, they must be able to opportunisti ally adapt to their environment and the robot olony onguration, responding reliably to the dynami hanges that will inevitably o ur over time. This paper explores these issues in the ontext of robot olonies for the site preparation task { a task identied by NASA as an important pre ursor to human missions to Mars. We identify the important issues driving the need for opportunisti adaptation in site preparation and des ribe our planned approa h to addressing this task, along with our planned robot experiments. KEYWORDS:Multi-robot teams, adaptation, robot olonies, spa e ap-pli ations, site preparation