Autonomous Multiagent Space Exploration with High-Level Human Feedback

Abstract

Robotic space-exploration missions have always pushed the limits of science and technology, and will continue to do so by their very nature. Such missions are particularly challenging, as they operate in environments with high uncertainty, light-time delays, and high mission costs. Artificial-intelligence-based multiagent systems can alleviate these concerns by 1) creating autonomous multirobot teams that can function in uncertain environments, 2) navigating and operating without time-sensitive commands from Earth-bound scientists, and 3) spreading the mission cost across multiple platforms that will eliminate the danger of total mission loss in the case of a malfunctioning robot. In this work, a novel human in-the-loop cooperative coevolutionary algorithm is presented to train a multirobot system exploring an unknown environment. Autonomous robots learn to make low-level control decisions to maximize scientific data acquisition, whereas human scientists on Earth learn the changing mission profiles and pr...