NASA's new rovers will be a fleet of mobile robots that work together

NASA is exploring a concept for a new fleet of mini-rovers that can work together to solve problems and make decisions as a unit. If one fails or gets stuck somewhere, the others could carry on without it. As part of the Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration (CADRE) project, NASA engineers are designing compact, mobile robots the size of a shoebox (for comparison, Perseverance is the size of a small SUV) to autonomously explore the moon and other planets. These rovers will operate as a group to collect data in hard-to-reach places like craters and caves. In a demonstration mission expected in the next few years, CADRE's mini-rovers will explore the moon's massive lava tubes--areas where the top layer of soil has solidified, but lava still flows beneath.