An Addendum to NeBula: Toward Extending Team CoSTAR’s Solution to Larger Scale Environments
Autonomous collaborative exploration in ultra-large-scale, unstructured underground environments remains challenging due to severe communication constraints, navigation uncertainty, and lack of prior maps. Method: This work extends TEAM CoSTAR’s NeBula autonomy system with a full-stack enhancement framework integrating semantic-geometric joint mapping, distributed POMDP-based global planning under communication constraints, adaptive filtering for localization, Gaussian process–based probabilistic traversability modeling, edge-cloud cooperative communication protocols, and aerial-ground heterogeneous multi-agent task allocation. Contribution/Results: The framework achieves, for the first time, robust long-range mapping (>5 km²), sub-meter localization accuracy (<0.3 m), and decentralized collaborative decision-making in kilometer-scale underground spaces (e.g., limestone mines). Validated in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge and real-world mine deployments, it improves mission completion rate by 37%, significantly advancing scalability, robustness, and coordination in autonomous underground exploration.