Tool for Autonomous Terrain Exploration of Remote Space

NASA currently has multiple missions focused on exploration of extraterrestrial bodies in our solar system, both by autonomous platforms alone, in teams, and in collaboration with long-duration human habitation, all of which require advanced levels of autonomy. TATERS will develop mission planning and high level collaborative autonomy capabilities for swarms of surface and satellite vehicles that would allow NASA and other groups to be able to deploy autonomous teams of robots into previously unexplored spaces. TATERS Phase II will focus on maturation of the planning,analysis, and interface capabilities developed in Phase I for such missions. Phase I focused primarily on traversal analysis for individual and teams of robots in reference scenarios at the south pole of the moon that incorporated both scientific exploration and construction tasks. Phase II will expand and enhance the methods used in Phase I, increase fidelity of the testing environment by incorporating scientific data sources and models, integrate with existing NASA software products, and demonstrate transition feasibility through hardware-in-the-loop testing with UGVs. When planning complex missions with extended operation times, risk analysis requirements, expected autonomy requirements, and relatively high uncertainty of science objectives and mission execution, the ability to perturb any and all variables under consideration during planning is critical for identifying system failure modes. The traversal planning approach used by TATERS is novel in its ability to incorporate data across multiple resolutions, which enables pre-mission planning for high-level multi-agent coordination, rapid risk analysis of traversals through Monte Carlo testing, as well as integration into a navigation stack with real-time sensor stream and updates. Therefore, the TATERS approach demonstrates interoperability between human-in-the-loop navigation and control and autonomy stacks implemented on deployed platforms.