Kolvenbach Engineering provided the project management and prime interface to ESA for a planetary rover field test expedition to Tenerife in cooperation with the sub-contractor KP robotics.

During this activity, a dataset was collected with a robotic vehicle (rover) in an environment representative of other solar system locations for the development and benchmarking of algorithms for planetary rovers. The focus was laid on variety of terrains, sensor configurations and lighting conditions for the software to be tested on. Part of this objective was to compare and evaluate the performance of different sensors for future exploration missions.

A simulation of a teleoperation scenario representative for the ExoMars rover operation was conducted. The robot driving team, located in Turin, sent instructions to the rover in Tenerife. The field test team executed the commands and sent back the acquired telemetry. This helped to verify software tools and procedures for operation control centres.

Additionally, many valuable lessons were learned during this activity which might serve as an input for future robotic field test operations by the agency.