Mission-level path planning and re-planning for rover exploration

The Life in the Atacama (LITA) project seeks to develop technologies for robotic life detection and apply them to the investigation of the Atacama Desert. Its field investigation in 2005 will demonstrate highly autonomous robotic science and daily multi-kilometer traverses over several weeks. A key component is mission-level path planning, which combines large-scale route selection, path and activity timing, and predictive energy management. Its purpose is to yield high-level plans for locomotion, solar charging and hibernation. We describe this new level of robotic autonomy and illustrate its performance from the field experiments in 2003.