Video Transcript
NASA and JPL announced plans to send three autonomous mini-rovers to the moon to evaluate how they work together without human input. The Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration project (CADRE) marks another chapter in NASA’s quest to develop autonomous robots that could bolster mission efficiency. The agency intends to assess the robots’ ability to support astronauts or enable new science as they take simultaneous measurements from various locations.
NASA expects the three rovers to reach the moon next year. They will be placed onto the Reiner Gamma region of the moon and will move to an area where they can charge via solar panels. Once charged, the rovers will spend about two Earth weeks conducting experiments. Mission controllers will send broad instructions from Earth to the robots’ base. The robots will elect a leader that will assign work to each rover, and the robot will determine how to finish its task safely.
CADRE Principal Investigator Jean-Pierre de la Croix explained that the mission controllers’ instructions would be limited to something like, “Go explore this region.” It will be on the rovers to figure out when to drive, what path to take, and how to navigate around hazards. Meanwhile, the mission controllers will monitor if the robots can drive in formation and stay on course, spread out to explore an area and create a topographic 3D map with stereo cameras, and how they respond should one stop working.
However, the robots will need to endure the environment near the moon’s equator, which can reach 237 degrees Fahrenheit during the day. They will also need enough power to operate JPL’s cooperative autonomy software. The base station and rovers draw computational power from a processing chip, but this processor usage adds to the heat generated. To combat the heat, the project team designed the robots to shut down every half hour so they could cool and recharge their batteries.
The rovers are about the size of a carry-on bag and are made from custom-built components and commercial off-the-shelf parts. If successful, the rovers would demonstrate their ability to capture data beyond the capabilities of a single robot.
