MONSID mentioned in article on self-reliant rovers in the Journal of Field Robotics
Published: August 11, 2020
Last updated: August 31, 2022
Okean Solutions' MONSID® technology was evaluated on JPL's Athena test rover to provide mobility health assessment. MONSID was one of four autonomy enabling technologies in the Self-Reliant Rover (SRR) strategic initiative program designed to increase mission productivity of future JPL rovers. This work was documented in Self-Reliant Rovers for Increased Mission Productivity, a research paper published in the Journal of Field Robotics.
Okean Solutions' Ksenia Kolcio was one of the authors of the paper.
JPL's Athena test rover with wheel drag.
The abstract of the paper follows:
Self-reliant Rovers for Increased Mission Productivity
Achieving consistently high levels of productivity has been a challenge for Mars surface missions. While the rovers have made major discoveries and dramatically increased our understanding of Mars, they require a great deal of interaction from the operations teams, and achieving mission objectives can take longer than anticipated when productivity is paced by the ground teams' ability to react.
We have conducted a project to explore technologies and techniques for creating self-reliant rovers (SRR): rovers that are able to maintain high levels of productivity with reduced reliance on ground interactions. This paper describes the design of SRR and a prototype implementation that we deployed on a research rover. We evaluated the system by conducting a simulated campaign in which members of the Mars Science Laboratory (Curiosity rover) science team used our rover to explore a geographical region. The evaluation demonstrated the system's ability to maintain high levels of productivity with limited communication with operators.
