Infrastructures

LunaLab

This Laboratory is a lunar analogue facility that consists of a close structure of 11x7 meters filled with 20 tons of basalt to try to emulate the surface of the moon. It is equipped with 12 cameras of a motion capture system and 3 IP cameras to register the experiments. The Laboratory is illuminated with a cinema lamp hanging from a ceiling rail that permits to change the amount, the location and direction of the illumination. The purpose of this illumination is to generate a similar illumination to the polar regions of the Moon that is between 3 and 6 degrees. The experiments to perform in this Lab are focused on the use of lunar mobile robotic systems and developed algorithms for autonomous navigation, localization, trajectory planning and control for the rover itself and for other robotics tools, such as a robotic arms or a robotic drilling systems, focusing on activities related to space resources search, detection, localization, identification, manipulation and transportation.

OrbitLab (under construction):

This Lab is supposed to be used for orbital robotics oriented research. It will be a 2D zero-gravity facility. It will consist 3x5 meters perfectly flat floor in where different types of platforms with constant air floor will be floating on this surface, emulating a zero-gravity environment on the floor plane and in the rotation axis from bottom to top of the platform.

The experiments to perform in this infrastructure are related to autonomous navigation, target detection, identification, and localization, grasping and docking with cooperative and non-cooperative systems, among others. This Laboratory will be equipped with a motion capture system that measures the pose (position and orientation) of any object or robot with under millimetre precision. That will provide precise information to validate the algorithms implemented in the Labs.

Flight Arena (Automation & Robotics Research Group):

As part of the collaboration with the Automation & Robotics research group in many projects we have also access to a 5x5x5 meters flight arena, a fleet of multicopters and different type of sensors. This lab was designed and constructed on 2016 by Prof. Miguel Olivares-Mendez when he was the Research Scientist in charge of the aerial robotics activities in this group. This lab is also equipped with a motion capture system and allows to test, evaluate and validate autonomous navigation approaches on perception, state estimation, control and trajectory planning. This is Lab is now lead by Dr. Jose Luis Sanchez-Lopez at the Automation & Robotics research group headed by Prof. Holger Voos.