Mars has always been a source of fascination for humanity, and in the coming years, we may finally be able to establish permanent settlements on the red planet. However, this won't be an easy feat. Mars is an incredibly hostile environment compared to Earth. Its atmosphere is very thin, and it's extremely cold, with temperatures that can drop as low as -284 degrees Fahrenheit. Building a self-sustaining colony on Mars will require significant technological advances in areas like robotics and resource utilization. Despite the challenges, scientists and engineers around the world are actively working to overcome these obstacles and make human habitation on Mars a reality.

Congratulations! You have been tasked with designing a settlement for the red planet, and particularly the robotic system to construct it. In this mission briefing, you will be introduced to the current research and concepts people have looked into as they have imagined ways to live on Mars, going step by step.

As a first solution, we can imagine bringing up separate capsules from Earth and connecting them together. This may be the first step to establishing a settlement.

However, as more humans arrive on Mars, building up settlements in this way becomes costly and not scalable. It costs about $4,000 / kg to bring supplies to low earth orbit, and many times that to the surface of Mars. Though the cost is bound to decrease, the limits of the rocket equation will still make bringing up so much mass for a Martian base inefficient. Furthermore, radiation on the Martian surface can still penetrate capsules, impacting the well being of our astronauts.

What if we use Martian regolith, that beautiful red dust, to build our settlement? Researchers call this building in-situ, or utilizing the local materials available. That way we use it to protect ourselves form radiation, while only bringing the minimum life support systems we need from Earth.

We can get our astronauts to build these structures, but the harsh planetary conditions, cost of sending up materials, and time it takes to build makes this process unsafe. This means we will need to create robots that can find, carry, build, and then maintain our buildings between our missions and before the first humans even land on Mars.

We need a robot that satisfies a few goals. First, that won't break down in harsh conditions. Second, it has to operate autonomously as the communication lag between the Earth and Mars is 7 minutes, not allowing for the real time control by a human operator as it takes 15 min to recieve information from Mars and send back instructions. Third, it has to be capable of handling complex tasks over the Martian surface.

We can potentially bring a single rover to Mars that is an allstar and does it all. All the rovers we have sent up to Mars so far have been single robots with multiple tools, tele-operated (with some lag) by operators on Earth.

This is a huge engineering challenge.

We would need to send up another one.

A long time.

With a single rover, we run into some issues we need to think through. If it breaks down, we will need to send another rover to Mars, which may take a few years. And even if in the small chance it doesn't, it will take a single rover years to build a single habitat, even assuming we can make it function autonomysly to avoid the 20 min Earth-based control delay. Space is a tough place, and if we want to build a settlement we need to come up with another solution.

Humans on Earth always build in groups. It takes hundreds of people, each with their own job, to construct a Martian rover. It would take one person decades. If we look at nature, we see how animals, such as termites, work together to construct settlements many times their size.

Can we have a lot of smaller robots, each doing their own thing, build up a Martian settlement together? We can imagine each robot being part of a swarm, doing it's own thing, contributing to a common goal.

Researchers, space-architects, space agencies, and biologists have started to ask this question and explore the possibilities of swarm robotics for building settlements on Mars. Taking inspiration from nature, their research hints at just the beginning of what is possible. Observing natural phenomenons on Earth may teach us how to bring life to other planets.

Once we have our swarm of robots, we can think about making a settlement in 4 main steps, each with its own mission objective.