System description - Termining/SpaceApps2016 GitHub Wiki

Our goal is to design an autonomous distributed asteroid mining system that utilizes swarm robotic miners called "termites" to extract materials and manipulate asteroids. Such a system mainly addresses the needs of orbital construction allowing to use raw materials and manufacturing in orbit. The system comprises of two major elements:

1. The scouting cluster responsible for detecting and analysing asteroids provides all the decision making information necessary for the efficient deployment of the mining missions.

2. The Hives. A hive is a long range carrier spacecraft that hosts the Termite mining robots. Each termite can extract either water or solid materials from the asteroid. Collected water is returned to the hive in order to create oxygen and hydrogen. These gasses are stored in high pressure vessels allowing both increased storage as well as utilization as fuel. Solid material is stored in the termite "abdomen", a storage space at the rear of the robot. Once full, a termite return to the hive to deposit collected materials and refuel for the next run. Once the Hive's mission is complete, it will return to the material exploitation points (Earth/Moon/Mars orbit)