Multi-Agent Autonomy for Space Exploration on the CADRE Lunar Technology Demonstration

CADRE (Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration) is a lunar technology demonstration mission of multi-agent autonomy on a team of three rovers and a base station. The mission is slated land at the Moon’s Reiner Gamma region as a CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) pay-load on the IM-3 mission in 2024. The goal of CADRE is to demonstrate how a team of autonomous rovers, receiving only high-level tasks from Earth, can autonomously explore a region of the Lunar surface, as well as perform a distributed measurement in coordination with a multi-static ground-penetrating radar. We envision that multi-agent autonomy will enable future missions to address hitherto-unanswered questions in planetary science on the Moon, Mars, and beyond. In this paper, we describe the autonomy architecture developed for CADRE, both for multi-agent coordination, and for single-agent driving surface mobility, and discuss the requirements and constraints that led to the selection of this architecture.