Infrastructure Stack · Layer 05
Autonomy & Robotics
Machines capable of constructing, inspecting, maintaining and operating infrastructure when humans are not present.
Why it matters
Working when humans are not present.
For the foreseeable future most lunar work will be done by machines, supervised from far away. A round trip to Earth takes about two and a half seconds at best, and robots have to act, navigate and recover from faults inside that delay.
Autonomy and robotics convert infrastructure plans into work actually done on the surface, and keep that infrastructure running between crewed missions.
Robots will construct and maintain infrastructure.
Inside this layer
6 building blocks
Robotics
Manipulators and robotic systems built to work in dust, vacuum and extreme temperature.
Autonomous navigation
Machines that find their own way without waiting for instructions from Earth.
Inspection
Monitoring the condition of lunar assets so problems are found before they become failures.
Maintenance
Robotic repair and upkeep of infrastructure when no crew is present.
Construction
Site preparation, assembly and building carried out by machines.
Remote operations
Supervising and teleoperating lunar systems from Earth and from lunar orbit.
Connect the stack
Dependencies
These aren’t isolated technologies. The opportunity lies in understanding how those systems connect.
This layer depends on
This layer enables
Questions we are watching
Open questions
- Which autonomy stacks become the common platform that many builders standardize on?
- What does remote operation at scale look like, and who provides it?
- How much maintenance can be done by robots before a crew has to intervene?