Autonomous rovers for Mars exploration

The Pathfinder mission demonstrated the potential for robotic Mars exploration but at the same time indicated the need for more robust rover autonomy. Future planned missions call for long traverses over unknown terrain, robust navigation and instrument placement, and reliable operations for extended periods of time. Ultimately, missions may visit multiple science sites in a single day and perform opportunistic science data collection, as well as complex scouting, construction, and maintenance tasks in preparation for an eventual human presence. Significant advances in robust autonomous operations are needed to enable these types of missions. Towards this end, we have designed an on-board executive architecture that incorporates robust flexible operation, resource utilization, and failure recovery. In addition, we have designed ground tools to produce and refine contingent schedules that take advantage of the on-board architecture's flexible execution characteristics. Together, the on-board executive and the ground tools constitute an integrated rover autonomy architecture