ADVANCED ROBOTICS TECHNOLOGY INFUSION TO THE NASA MARS EXPLORATION ROVER (MER) PROJECT

This paper presents four new technology developments and their infusion into the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission. These technologies were not ready for infusion prior to the launch of this mission. Three of these new capabilities are designed to increase the level of autonomy for the operations, i.e., fewer ground-in-the-loop steps for executing commands. One of the new capabilities is designed to intelligently filter rover obtained images and return only those that are very likely to contain useful information. These new capabilities will be used for this and future NASA planetary missions.