Infrastructure Stack · Layer 04
Mobility & Autonomy
Operating where crews are rare and delay is constant.
Why it matters
Operating where crews are rare and delay is constant.
For the foreseeable future most lunar work will be done by machines, supervised from far away. Rovers, manipulators and construction robots have to move, navigate and recover from faults with limited help.
Mobility and autonomy are the layer that converts infrastructure plans into work actually done on the surface. They are also the biggest consumers of communications, navigation, power and compute.
Machines will do most of the work. The question is what they depend on to do it.
Inside this layer
5 building blocks
Rovers
Crewed and uncrewed surface vehicles for science, prospecting, cargo and construction, built to survive the night.
Robotics
Manipulators and specialized machines for excavation, assembly, inspection and maintenance.
Autonomous operations
Software that plans, executes and recovers without a human in the loop for every step.
Navigation
Terrain-relative and signal-based navigation for traverses across unmapped, low-contrast terrain.
Routing
Path planning across craters, slopes, shadows and dust, with energy and thermal budgets in the loop.
Connect the stack
Dependencies
Rather than evaluating companies in isolation, we look for dependencies between infrastructure layers, and ask what must exist before the next layer can scale.
This layer depends on
This layer enables
Across every layer
Questions we are watching
Open questions
- Which autonomy stacks become the common platform that many rover builders standardize on?
- How do autonomous systems share the same navigation and timing references?
- What does teleoperation at scale look like, and who provides it?