Inside a cleanroom at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, three moon rovers undergo final checks before being attached to flight hardware, ahead of a proposed launch later this year. The Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration rovers, or CADRE for short, are a technology test of what NASA calls a multi-agent autonomous rover. Once on the moon, the trio will work together to autonomously complete tasks. Onboard each device are two stereo cameras, navigation sensors and ground-penetrating radar, which can create detailed 3D maps of the lunar surface.
Rather than micromanage the mission, controllers on Earth will give the rovers simple, high-level commands to achieve an overall objective, such as requesting that they search and study a specific area. How the rovers complete that task, manage obstacles, maintain communications and return the required data will largely be handled autonomously, with all three working in unison. “Fundamentally, this will change how we explore the moon or any planetary body,” says Subha Comandur, the project manager of CADRE. The rovers are scheduled to launch to the Reiner Gamma region of the moon aboard the Intuitive Machines 3 lander, where they will spend the daylight hours of a single lunar day – which is equivalent to about 14 Earth days of mission time – conducting experiments.
CADRE will help develop the technology required for more ambitious autonomous rovers in the future, enabling robust exploration of extreme environments such as lava or ice caves, the surface of Mars or even ocean worlds. “Once we show this successfully working on the moon, we could potentially send this same technology to anywhere,” says Comandur. The tech could even interact with human astronauts to return samples or be used in other vehicles such as drones, she adds. “Autonomy can really help us explore further our solar system,” says Jean-Pierre de la Croix, the principal investigator of CADRE.
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