Safe Mission-Level Path Planning for Exploration of Lunar Shadowed Regions by a Solar-Powered Rover

Olivier Lamarre, Shantanu Malhotra, Jonathan Kelly

Article accepted in the 2024 IEEE Aerospace Conference

Overview

The importance of risk-aware planning when exploring PSRs with a solar-powered rover affected by recurring random faults. Subfigure A shows a nominal mission plan visiting waypoints of interest in a given order. After a fault/delay occurs during the traverse (subfigure B), risk-aware planning (blue dashed line) suggests an early PSR exit while risk-agnostic planning (white dashed line) finds an updated plan visiting the fourth waypoint, unaware of how dangerous this traverse schedule is. If a second fault occurs inside of the PSR (subfigure C), a rover following the risk-agnostic plan misses a crucial solar charging period; battery energy depletion becomes unavoidable (subfigure D). A rover following the risk-aware plan, on the other hand, is still capable of reaching the designated target region safely. Background image courtesy of NASA and Arizona State University. VIPER render courtesy of NASA.

Supplementary material

Distribution of Monte-Carlo trials between our approach and the CCDP algorithm

Traverse trials for the medium-scale traverse generated with our proposed algorithm

5 waypoints visited, no fault, safe region reached:

5 waypoints visited, 1 fault, safe region reached:

3 waypoints visited, 2 faults, safe region reached:

1 waypoint visited, 4 faults, safe region reached:

1 waypoint visited, 2 faults, mission failure:

Traverse trials near the LCROSS impact site

2 waypoints visited, six faults, safe region reached:

1 waypoint visited, two faults, safe region reached:

2 waypoints visited, six faults, mission failure:

Citation

@unpublished{lamarre2024safe,
  author = {Olivier Lamarre and Shantanu Malhotra and Jonathan Kelly},
  title  = {Safe Mission-Level Path Planning for Exploration of Lunar Permanently Shadowed Regions by a Solar-Powered Rover},
  note   = {2024 IEEE Aerospace (accepted)},
  year   = {2024},
}