Development of a Lander Autonomy Testbed for Ocean Worlds Missions

Abstract

NASA is developing platforms for evaluating autonomy technologies for lander-based robotic sampling missions to Ocean Worlds. As missions operate further from Earth under significant resource constraints and environmental uncertainty, autonomous technologies will have to play a greater role in their success. Significant advances have been made at academic, other government and industry research laboratories in recent years that could be leveraged for Ocean Worlds lander missions. Our goal is to facilitate the application of these technologies for NASA missions by making available the use of a testbed to physically emulate the operation of lander with a sampling tool in a low gravity environment. The testbed comprises a lander, an instrument arm, and perception sensors typically found on lander missions. It will provide the hardware interfaces and low-level software infrastructure to allow commanding typical lander operations through a well-defined software interface. The testbed will model the environmental conditions and dynamic behavior of the lander on Ocean Worlds. It will also incorporate independent monitoring and data logging capabilities to evaluate the performance of the autonomy technologies.