Accelerating energy-aware spatiotemporal path planning for the lunar poles

Abstract

Future robotic missions to the poles of the Moon and Mercury will face challenges not encountered by current and prior planetary rover missions. Careful energy-aware spatiotemporal path planning will be required to accomplish mission objectives at high cadence under changing illumination conditions. With attention to landing site and time, such spatiotemporal path planning may enable extended missions on order of months that would not otherwise be possible. This work presents improvements in energy-aware spatiotemporal path planning for multiple waypoints to significantly reduce planning time. A time-compression technique is used to simplify planning in areas where changes occur infrequently. Consideration of end-goal reachability reduces the search space. Finally, heuristics that use pre-computation with static obstacles speed up the search.