Robosphere: Self-sustaining Robotic Ecologies as Precursors to Human Planetary Exploration

The present sequential “mission oriented” approach to robotic planetary exploration, could be changed to an “infrastructure building” approach where a robotic presence is permanent, self sustaining and growing with each mission. We call this self-sustaining robotic ecology approach “robosphere” and discuss the technological issues that need to be addressed before this concept can be realized. One of the major advantages of this approach is that a robosphere would include much of the infrastructure required by human explorers and would thus lower the preparation and risk threshold inherent in the transition from robotic to human exploration. In this context we discuss some implications for space architecture.