A test campaign took place from 27 to 29 June at the Santa Bárbara Foundation's facilities in Ribera del Folgoso, León, Spain, as part of the Cooperative Robots for Extreme Environments (CoRob-X) space robotics project.

CoRob-X falls within the Strategic Research Cluster (SRC) on Space Robotics Technologies, coordinated by the PERASPERA project under the Horizon 2020 program.

Led by DFKI, CoRob-X aims to develop and demonstrate enabling technologies for multi-agent robotic equipment, geared towards improving cooperation between robots. The main application is lunar surface exploration, with a focus on hard-to-reach areas such as craters and lava tunnels.

CoRob-X will provide significant advances in future robotic exploration missions in critical areas such as locomotion, autonomy, and inter-robot cooperation. 

One of the greatest challenges to improving planetary surface exploration is the development and demonstration of technologies and capabilities that planetary robots need to autonomously and independently make the necessary decisions to perform their tasks, minimize risk, and seize all the opportunities that come up to gather scientific information in hard-to-reach places.

In order to demonstrate the validity of these technologies for industry, the project is also developing a ground mining application. The ground-based project uses two GMV robots, a rover and a drone, that work together to explore a tunnel. The Santa Bárbara Foundation is collaborating with GMV on the project by providing its facilities.

The tests in June focused on the ground scenario and were carried out in tunnels at the Santa Bárbara Foundation's facilities. The aim of these tests was to demonstrate and validate key technologies for the exploration of this hard-to-reach area in a fully autonomous and independent manner. For this purpose, the Foxizirc rover, developed entirely by GMV, mapped the state of the tunnel during its route. Tests were also carried out with the drone to explore the tunnel in depth.