Development strategies for multi-robot teams in context of planetary exploration

In the realm of extraterrestrial exploration, robotics has primarily centered around the deployment of large and complex rovers for planetary missions. Therefore, the risk of total loss in the event of an error is relatively high for a single complex system. Currently, the issue is being addressed by relying on redundancy, which makes the systems even more complex. In contrast, there are approaches to have several robotic systems acting together in a multi-robotic team to fulfill different tasks, which can still be carried out with the remaining systems, if one system fails. The German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence has developed various approaches with different heterogeneous teams and successfully tested them in a number of field tests. This paper provides an overview of the already conducted work and provides an insight into future strategies.