Automatic Driving Command Evaluation for the MMX Rover IDEFIX

Abstract

The exploration rover IDEFIX is part of the JAXA mission "Martian Moons eXploration" (MMX). The rover is designed by the Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES) and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) to explore the surface of the Martian moon Phobos. IDEFIX will be the first wheeled robotic system in a milli-g environment. Challenges for the rover mobility include the milli-g environment, the largely unknown surface conditions, and the severely interrupted communication scheme. The early phase of the mission will focus on manual driving via direct commands to the locomotion subsystem to validate the behavior of the rover and previously made assumptions. Efficient planning and evaluation of these commands are required to find the safest path for IDEFIX to the target. A simulation-based algorithm ranks given commands based on risk factors. Monte Carlo-style simulations are used to generate the required data. This paper presents the design and challenges of a simulation-based command evaluation algorithm for the MMX rover IDEFIX.