Future Trends in Autonomous Cave Mapping for Flight Missions

Autonomous cave mapping for flight missions is converging on a small set of trends: tethered descent, SubT-class SLAM, and quilts that survive comms blackouts.

Autonomous cave mapping for flight missions has a clock on it that analog teams feel but do not always name. The DARPA Subterranean Challenge final event closed out with algorithms that could solve the uncharted-cave SLAM problem well enough for real search-and-rescue deployment, and the CMU Robotics Institute account of Team Explorer in DARPA SubT Challenge makes it clear the open research questions are now narrower than most program offices assume. At the same time, the LPI planetary community view of lunar and Martian lava tube exploration is explicit that the decadal program cannot be done without autonomy — the comms geometry and the traverse scale do not permit teleoperation end-to-end.