Rover technology development and mission infusion beyond MER

This paper describes recent efforts of the Mars Technology Program (MTP) to develop, integrate, and validate new rover technologies for upcoming missions. Missions planned after the current Mars Exploration Rovers require increased autonomy in several usage scenarios: long traverse, instrument placement, sampling, and onboard science data processing. To ensure improvements over current systems, MTP is funding component technology development toward these ends, as well as integration efforts that unify the components to address the larger scenarios. This unified software is expanding a developing infrastructure of common tools for operations, control, and hardware interfacing or system simulation. Using these, validation efforts are underway to quantify the performance of the scenario solutions, and document these for subsequent presentation to the upcoming flight projects.