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Introduction
All planetary rovers are mobile scientific instrument platforms – scientific investigation is their raison d'etre. Robotics has much to contribute to the pursuit of planetary science, including astrobiology in the context of planetary exploration. However, robotic astrobiology is still nascent and underdeveloped despite its promise. This review of the current state-of-the-art and discussion of the prospects and future directions of robotic astrobiology is focused on Mars rover missions. It is neither comprehensive nor objective, but it is hoped that it will stimulate further developments. The primary objective of robotic astrobiology is to marshal techniques of robotics to serve the astrobiology quest by enhancing the scientific productivity of Mars rover missions. The long-term objective is to create a ‘robotic astrobiologist’ facility on board future planetary rovers that can match or exceed the capabilities of human astrobiologists on Earth. This will enormously increase the scientific productivity of rover missions by allowing the rover to make decisions on selecting high priority targets and the appropriate methods of interrogation of the target using a judiciously selected set of scientific instruments onboard. This constitutes the back-engine of this facility to implement decision-making based on scientific classifications equivalent to the combined expertise of human scientists. Of course, the human scientist at the Earth station will remain the overseer. The short-term objective is to focus on the front end of such a facility – signal processing of camera images in order to classify rocks. Our principal tool for these investigations is the 30 kg Kapvik microrover designed from an earlier concept for a Mars microrover as part of a low-cost Mars mission (Ellery et al. 2004a, b, 2006) (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1.
Kapvik micro-rover at the Canadian Space Agency's Mars Yard.
[Figure omitted. See PDF]
Kapvik (Inuit word for wolverine, a rather ferocious small mammal native to the Canadian north) was developed for the CSA (Canadian Space Agency) by an industry–academia consortium, the mechanical design of which is described in Setterfield et al. (2014), while aspects of its electronics architecture is described in Cross et al. (2013). There are several novel features in its design. It implements an instrumented rocker-bogie chassis permitting online traction analysis during traverse (Setterfield & Ellery 2013). Furthermore, it adopts an...