Self-Reliant Rovers for Increased Mission Productivity

Achieving consistently high levels of productivity has been a challenge for Mars surface missions. While the rovers have made major discoveries and dramatically increased our understanding of Mars, they require a great deal of interaction from the operations teams, and achieving mission objectives can take longer than anticipated when productivity is paced by the ground teams’ ability to react. We have conducted a project to explore technologies and techniques for creating SelfReliant Rovers: rovers that are able to maintain high levels of productivity with reduced reliance on ground interactions. This paper paper describes the design of Self-Reliant Rovers and a prototype implementation that we deployed on a research rover. We evaluated the system by conducting a simulated campaign in which members of the Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity rover) science team used our rover to explore a geographical region. The evaluation demonstrated the system’s ability to maintain high levels of productivity with limited communication with operators.