Relative Benefits of Potential Autonomy Technology Investments

JPL is considering the development and launch of a roving long-range, long-duration science laboratory to Mars that will be a major leap in the in-situ exploration of Mars. This paper focuses on methods to determine relative benefits of autonomy technology development investments for accomplishing this mission’s goals. We developed a framework that looks at both cost and risk early in the design process in order to determine the investment strategy in new technology development that will lead to the lowest risk mission possible which enables desired science return within a given budget. The work was performed under NASA's Engineering for Complex Systems (ECS) program.