Advanced Human Lunar Surface Mobility Technologies

NASA's Artemis missions aim to establish a long-term human presence on the Moon, requiring advanced capabilities for both human and robotic surface mobility. The Extravehicular Activity (EVA) and Human Surface Mobility (HSM) Program (EHP) seeks to provide safe, reliable, and effective mobility systems, including the Exploration EVA (xEVA) suits, Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV), Pressurized Rover (PR), and Lunar Utility Vehicle (LUV). To achieve these objectives, several critical technological gaps must be addressed, particularly concerning autonomous operations and the fundamental understanding of vehicle-regolith interactions in the lunar environment. Autonomous Navigation and Control for Lunar Surface Mobility: Artemis crewed missions will involve extended uncrewed periods where surface assets and vehicles must operate autonomously or semi-autonomously to perform various tasks, including scientific exploration, vehicle relocation, and preparing for crew arrival. The lunar south pole presents unique and challenging environmental conditions, such as extreme temperatures, radiation, unknown soil properties, and harsh lighting. Furthermore, communications are characterized by significant time delays, latency, bandwidth limitations, and intermittent connections, unlike Earth-based or even Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) operations. Current remote command and control approaches are not suited for these operational constraints. Therefore, there is a critical need for advanced autonomous navigation, path planning, localization, soil mechanic forward control, and hazard detection/avoidance algorithms that enable high-progress-rate driving and robust operation despite limited situational awareness and communication challenges. This includes developing novel supervised autonomy, new simulation tools, and shared control paradigms to effectively integrate human oversight with onboard autonomous decision-making, ensuring efficient and safe operations when crew are away. Context for Small Businesses: The areas of autonomous mobility and advanced modeling/simulation are rapidly evolving, with many small businesses actively engaged in developing innovative solutions for terrestrial applications. NASA encourages these businesses to translate, adapt, and extend their expertise to meet the unique challenges of the lunar environment. While terrestrial autonomous driving still requires oversight and relies on resources not yet available on the Moon (e.g., GPS, rich training datasets, high-performance embedded processors, high-speed wireless communications), small businesses are uniquely positioned to innovate by adapting existing approaches or developing entirely new technologies. This subtopic provides an opportunity for small businesses to contribute directly to Artemis mission objectives, develop dual-use technologies with significant non-NASA commercialization potential, and differentiate themselves in a growing global space economy. Proposals should clearly demonstrate the applicability of their proposed solutions to lunar surface operations and show a viable path for integration with EHP flight projects like the Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV), Pressurized Rover (PR), and Lunar Utility Vehicle (LUV).