Appendix A: Cooperative Energy-aware Navigation of Hybrid Airships in the Atmosphere of Venus

Although the severity of the environment on Venus’ surface presents an enormous challenge for exploration rovers, in altitudes that range from 50km to 65km, the temperatures of the Venusian atmosphere are below 77 degrees Celsius, thus allowing the presence of flying robots, also known as aerobots. Among the initial concepts for aerial exploration are the hybrid airships, which rely on both buoyancy and aerodynamic lift to control their altitude and lateral position. This design allows the vehicle to use solar energy during the day to power a set of propellers and rise to altitudes close to 60km, while at night it is unpowered and may sink to 50km. The vehicle may be lost if it drops below this altitude, where the high temperatures can damage its electronic circuits. In this project, we will address two important navigation problems to be encountered by groups of aerobots performing scientific missions in Venus: motion planning and localization. Motion planning is important from the scientific point of view, allowing the mission control to position the vehicles in specific latitudes, altitudes, and spatial distribution, and is fundamental to allow extended mission times, keeping the vehicles in a safe region (in terms of temperature and pressure) of the atmosphere. We propose an approach based on an online motion planner that will exploit the natural winds of the atmosphere and the vehicles’ aerodynamics to control their altitudes using minimum power. Besides aiming at a smaller altitude variance, which would also reduce the temperature variance on the aerobot, using a combination of gliding, soaring, and powered flight, the planner would allow the vehicles to save energy during the day and use it during the night while meeting the science objectives. Thus, even without solar power, the vehicles would be able to react to situations of potential altitude loss caused by unpredicted turbulences, which would increase their robustness to adverse atmospheric conditions and consequently, their lifetime. As our second goal, we will use the cooperation of multiple aerobots for precise localization of each vehicle in Venus’ atmosphere. Within this approach, each aerobot will measure the relative inter-platform ranges and share other navigation data with nearby aerobots. Additionally, global intensity information (e.g., gravity anomaly or magnetic anomaly) previously mapped with an orbiter would provide an important information source for aerobot localization. Due to the limitation of communication ranges, the overall aerobot team will be considered as multiple subgroups with each aerobot as the information center of a sub-group. In each subgroup, a centralized cooperative localization estimation is performed to estimate each aerobot’s global pose (i.e., position and orientation) with the corresponding covariance matrices to represent pose uncertainties. We will consider motion planning and localization as complementary problems. While a group of aerobots can be used to cooperatively estimate the natural wind flow of the atmosphere, thus allowing the execution of more intelligent motion plans for each vehicle, actively controlled aerobot motions may be used to drive down localization uncertainties during an extended mission duration. We will evaluate the developed algorithms through a series of simulations that will consider a variety of mission requirements and approximate models for the aerobots and Venus’ atmosphere.

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