Robotic Floating Swarms for Intra-Vehicular Space Inspection

Abstract

With the upcoming launch of a new generation of space stations designed to operate unmanned over long durations, the need for continuous monitoring of this infrastructure is becoming increasingly important. Robotic swarms offer a promising solution for maintaining the health and integrity of these structures. We begin by introducing the Tumblenauts, a bacteria-inspired robot swarm designed to perform intra-vehicular inspection in microgravity using stochastic “run-and-tumble” locomotion. However, evaluating the performance of these microgravity robots on Earth remains a key challenge. Existing experimental methods such as air-bearing tables and parabolic flights are costly and spatially confined which contributes to the difficulty of developing and validating swarm algorithms with these methods. Therefore, we introduce the Hovernauts, a low-cost robotic swarm testbed that replicates the stochastic “run and tumble” motion of the Tumblenauts in two-dimensions. The Hovernauts can glide on various flat surfaces, such as a table or a floor, without requiring any external infrastructure. They are extremely simple to manufacture and are specifically designed for swarm-level experimentation. Using this platform, we explore several active random walks inspired by bacterial run and tumble motion. Our analysis reveals that by controlling the frequency of thruster activation, we can modulate the robot’s exploration dynamics. We further investigate how dynamically adjusting the run probability enables the robots to climb gradients. Overall, the Hovernauts provide a low-cost and accessible platform that enables the development and validation of novel stochastic swarm algorithms for future space inspection applications.