A Mission Architecture for a Human-Robot Collaborative Planetary Exploration Cascade

Robotic systems are an important tool for planetary exploration, where the aim is to refine situation awareness from remote sensing to in-situ measurements to prove scientific hypotheses. But there are still limitations in sensing, reasoning, and manipulation that ask for future manned Mars missions, where human-level ingenuity can fill these gaps. By not using fully autonomous robots but keeping the human in the loop, semi-autonomous cooperation between astronauts and robots can assist astronauts in their daily work, to save valuable resources, increase safety by taking over risky tasks, and reduce their cognitive workload. While recent work has mainly focused on the specific capabilities of robots, we aim to develop and investigate a full exploration cascade utilizing this principle in the context of the AMADEE-24 Mars analog mission taking place in Armenia.

In this paper, we present a mission architecture utilizing a semi-autonomous exploration robot to be operated by analog astronauts aiming at investigating and verifying geological hypotheses on Mars. We design an architecture that is intuitive to use by astronauts and researchers on the ground, fits well into exploration procedures, and provides semi-autonomous capabilities to reduce the astronauts' task load. System requirements engineering was conducted using valuable insights from experienced members of previous analog Mars missions to maximize the contribution to the expiration mission. This knowledge is used to design a complete mission architecture that includes both system design and mission operations. The same experts are also used to perform a preliminary process evaluation to validate the proposed architecture.