Onboard planning and execution of mobility and telecommunications for the Endurance lunar rover

The Endurance mission concept requires a lunar rover to traverse thousands of kilometers over a long period of time (hundreds of days), across the South Pole-Aitken Basin on the far side of the Moon. The long duration and distance of this autonomous roving concept will require onboard reasoning capabilities to overcome challenges with limited ground-in-the-loop intervention. To achieve the ambitious mission objectives, uncertainties and anomalies related to the system or the environment state will have to be overcome quickly, with limited ground-in-the-loop interruptions. We describe an architecture and implementation of system-level autonomy software that would enable the required responsive behavior, with particular focus on an onboard activity scheduling and execution capability called MEXEC (Multi-mission EXECutive). Development of this system-level autonomy is driven by a set of scenarios representative of the proposed lunar mission. Our system-level autonomy software will be integrated with behavioral software providing mobility and telecommunications functions, and will be validated through Earth-analogue field testing. This paper will present a brief overview of the Endurance lunar mission concept, the overall architecture of the system-level autonomy, the representative scenarios, the development approach, the innovative features of the MEXEC scheduling and execution capability, and the preliminary results from testing the integrated capabilities.