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Inside a white room at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, three lunar rovers are undergoing final checks before being attached to flight hardware, ahead of a proposed launch later this year. U Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration Rovers, or CADRE for short, are a technology test of what NASA calls an autonomous multi-agent rover. Once on the moon, the trio will work together to autonomously complete the tasks. On board each device are two stereo cameras, navigation sensors and ground-penetrating radar, which can create detailed 3D maps of the lunar surface.
Instead of micromanaging the mission, controllers on Earth will give the rovers simple, high-level commands to achieve a general goal, such as asking them to search and study a specific area. How the rovers complete this task, manage obstacles, maintain communications and send back the necessary data will be largely handled autonomously, with all three working in unison. “Fundamentally, this will change how we explore the moon or any planetary body,” he says Commander Subha, CADRE’s project manager. The rovers are expected 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 the mission time – conducting experiments.
CADRE will help develop the technology needed for the most ambitious autonomous rovers in the future, enabling robust exploration of extreme environments such as lava or ice caves, the surface of Mars or even oceanic worlds. “Once we show this work successfully on the moon, we can send this same technology anywhere,” says Comandur. The technology could also interact with human astronauts to return samples or be used in other vehicles such as drones, he adds. “Autonomy can really help us explore more of our solar system,” he says John Peter of the CrossCADRE’s principal investigator.
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