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78 Insight | Space systems off into commercial autonomous and unmanned vehicles for rough terrain, for example for spraying banana crops on an inaccessible plantation on Guadeloupe, in the Caribbean. “The way we approach autonomy for a commercial system is that it needs to be safe, reliable and easy to use,” says Visscher. “One thing that’s really going to help us is an amphibious capability, because when you are crossing a stream or even a puddle with an electric vehicle you can’t always tell the depth of the water, so you can short out a traditional system. With an amphibious design the inside stays clean and dry – we use-off- the shelf vehicle computers which are not waterproof, as they don’t need to be, so our component costs go down, meaning we are less than half the price of other vehicles and with much greater capability.” Possibly the biggest challenge is developing autonomous vehicles to use on Mars. The two Mars Exploration Rovers sent by NASA in 2012 have provided key lessons and data for future missions, particularly regarding the use of autonomy. “A Mars rover is supervised autonomy,” says Visscher. “It is able to do a bit of path planning, but if there’s something it’s worried about it will stop. It’s a very cautious approach. To do a pure remote control, or teleop – even on the Moon, with only a few seconds’ delay – is quite difficult, so adding in autonomy will be able to increase the mission’s productivity a great deal.” The European Space Agency’s ExoMars project to send a rover to Mars has been in planning since 2005. The first phase of the project, in 2016, is to send an atmospheric gas monitoring satellite to the Red Planet that will also act as the relay for the ExoMars rover that will be launched in 2018. The rover aims to travel up to 70 m per Earth day, with a range of 25 km from the landing site over the year-long mission. A key element in the project is the autonomous navigation system, where the scientific team on Earth set the destination and the rover finds its own safe path. “Designing the autonomy for the rover is at the heart of the mission, and we have been trying not to make it too difficult for the development and verification,” says Luc Joudrier, who’s responsible for the ExoMars rover’s guidance, navigation, control and operations at the ESA. “We will be communicating with the rover every day, so we will upload the day’s running plan to it in the day and receive the telemetry back later that day,” he says. “While the rover is ‘sleeping’ during Mars night we will be processing the data and preparing a new plan for the next day, so the amount of autonomy we have been assigning is related to running a capability plan for one or two Earth days.” The amount of autonomy has been set by the scientists on the ground, who Summer 2015 | Unmanned Systems Technology Autonomous ground systems designed for the Moon have been adapted for inaccessible terrain on Earth such as this plantation in Guadeloupe The European Space Agency’s ExoMars rover is designed to cover up to 70 m a day and reach over 25 km from its landing site after it arrives in 2018