Reliability Impact on Planetary Robotic Missions

In the mobile robotics literature, there is little formal discussion of reliability and failure. Moreover, current work focuses more on the assessment of existing robots. In contrast, our work predicts the impact on reliability on robotic missions. In our previous work, we presented a quantitative analysis to predict the probability of robot failure during a mission and use this to compare the performance of different robot team configurations. In order to comprehensively characterize robot failure, we proposed a taxonomy system which divides planetary robotic missions into three classes and showed how the taxonomy can be used as a framework to explore the reliability characteristics of each mission class. In this paper, we define and simulate common mission scenarios for each class in the taxonomy system and attempt to extract general reliability trends and mission characteristics for given robot and environment parameters. Our results show that, for comparable mission scopes with a fixed budget, exploration-type missions have maximum mission success probability for smaller team sizes than is the case for construction-type missions.