NASA is headed back to the Moon, and this time the goal is to set up a long-term human presence on Earth's natural satellite. Astronauts spending time on and around the Moon may find an army of robotic helpers at their disposal, the first of which is being built and tested at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The CADRE project will deploy a trio of autonomous mapping robots on the Moon, and if successful, they could help NASA understand how best to build that army of bots.
The three CADRE (Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration) rovers are currently in the engineering prototype phase. NASA plans to deploy CADRE in 2024 via the CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative. The lander will touch down in the Reiner Gamma region of the Moon, but unlike past rover missions, NASA does not intend to control exactly what each robot does.
With something expensive and complex like the Perseverance Mars rover, the team carefully plans each maneuver. The low-cost CADRE bots are designed to operate autonomously. NASA hopes to simply tell the robots which area of the landscape to investigate with their stereo mapping cameras, and they'll figure out the rest, even electing a "leader" rover based on which is the most fit for the task. Mission managers will, however, be watching what the rovers do after being unleashed. The lander will have a control base station with a camera poking upward to keep tabs on the robots.
CADRE partially owes its existence to the smashing success of the Mars Ingenuity helicopter. Originally envisioned as a technology demonstrator, the helicopter was built using many off-the-shelf components that JPL did not expect to survive long on Mars. However, Ingenuity is still online, having recently completed its 50th flight. Ingenuity ran on the Snapdragon 801 smartphone processor, and NASA says CADRE uses a newer version of that chip. JPL confirms that the CADRE rovers use the VOXL single-board computer, which runs a Snapdragon 821 chip. That's the same processor that powered the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 (and did not have anything to do with the phone's propensity for fires).
JPL also had to figure out how to keep the solar-powered rovers cool. Temperatures in direct sunlight on the Moon can reach 237 degrees Fahrenheit (114 Celsius). So, the team decided to run CADRE in 30-minute cycles. They will operate for 30 minutes and then take another 30 to expel heat via radiators and recharge their batteries. Upon waking up, the rovers will again elect a leader and continue their autonomous operations. NASA hopes CADRE will prove the value of multi-robot missions for lunar exploration and development.
