Mars On-Site Shared Analytics Information and Computing

Abstract

We study the use of distributed computation in a representative multi-robot planetary exploration mission. We model a network of small rovers with access to computing resources from a static base station based on current design efforts and extrapolation from the Mars 2020 rover autonomy. The key algorithmic problem is simultaneous scheduling of computation, communication, and caching of data, as informed by an autonomous mission planner. We consider scheduling of a dependency chain of required and optional (but rewarding) tasks and present a consensus-backed scheduler for sharedworld, distributed scheduling based on an Integer Linear Program. We validate the pipeline with simulation and field results. Our results are intended to provide a baseline comparison and motivating application domain for future research into network-aware decentralized scheduling and resource allocation.