Supporting Increased Autonomy for a Mars Rover

This paper presents an architecture and set of technology for supporting increased autonomy for a planetary rover. The MER rovers have outperformed all expectations by lasting over 1300 sols (or Martian days), which is an order of magnitude longer than their original mission goal. The longevity of these vehicles will have significant effects on future rover missions. Common objectives for future rover missions to Mars include the onboard handling of opportunistic science, long-range driving, and increased onboard fault handling. To handle these goals, a number of new technologies have been developed and integrated as part of the CLARAty architecture. CLARAty is a unified and reusable robotic architecture that was designed to simplify the integration, testing and maturation of robotic technologies for future missions. This paper focuses on technology comprising the CLARAty Decision Layer, which was designed to support high-level autonomy technologies, such as automated planning and data analysis.