A Mission Taxonomy-Based Approach to Planetary Rover Cost-Reliability Tradeoffs

Abstract

Our earlier work on robot mission reliability provides tradeoff analysis between input parameters such as mission success rate, robot team size, and robot component reliability, but only for specific tasks. Here we take a more comprehensive approach in order to draw more general conclusions about robot mission reliability. The approach is based on a mission taxonomy coupled with detailed reliability analysis of each of the resultant mission classes. This paper describes initial work towards that goal. In this paper we present the above-mentioned taxonomy, which divides planetary robotic missions into subgroups with common characteristics with respect to the time proportion of tasks involved in the missions. For a given mission class, we show how a mission designer can obtain the optimum robot configuration in terms of robot team size and component reliability that maximize mission success rate under a budget constraint.