Beyond Traditional Energy Planning: the Weight of Computations in Planetary Exploration

The paper proposes a mission-aware energy planning strategy that highlights the weight of computations on the overall energy budget of possible future autonomous space robots for planetary exploration programs. The planning strategy addresses the problem of the limited power of such robots by extending some technical breakthroughs in the energy planning for autonomous terrestrial robots and attempting to apply them to the planetary exploration context. It saves energy by changing the trajectory and computation specific parameters during the mission as the robot batteries drain, accounting for a possible mission extension. It focuses on aspects of a space mission, such as its periodicity and uncertainty.