Biologically Inspired Autonomous Rover Control

Robotic missions beyond 2013 will likely be precursors to a manned habitat deployment on Mars. Such missions require robust control systems for long duration activities. Current single rover missions will evolve into deployment of multiple, heterogeneous cooperating robotic colonies. This paper describes the map-making memory and action selection mechanism of BISMARC (Biologically Inspired System for Map-based Autonomous Rover Control) that is currently under development at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA (Huntsberger and Rose, Neutral Networks, 11(7/8):1497–1510). BISMARC is an integrated control system for long duration missions involving robots performing cooperative tasks.