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Mission-critical exploration of uncertain environments requires reliable and robust mechanisms for achieving information gain. Typical measures of information gain such as Shannon entropy and KL divergence are unable to distinguish between different bimodal probability distributions or introduce bias toward one mode of a bimodal probability distribution. The use of a standard deviation (SD) metric reduces bias while retaining the ability to distinguish between higher and lower risk distributions. Areas of high SD can be safely explored through observation with an autonomous Mars Helicopter allowing safer and faster path plans for ground-based rovers. First, this study presents a single-agent information-theoretic utility-based path planning method for a highly correlated uncertain environment. Then, an information-theoretic two-stage multiagent rapidly exploring random tree framework is presented, which guides Mars helicopter through regions of high SD to reduce uncertainty for the rover. In a Monte Carlo simulation, we compare our information-theoretic framework with a rover-only approach and a naive approach, in which the helicopter scouts ahead of the rover along its planned path. Finally, the model is demonstrated in a case study on the Jezero region of Mars. Results show that the information-theoretic helicopter improves the travel time for the rover on average when compared with the rover alone or with the helicopter scouting ahead along the rover’s initially planned route. 

MAARS (Machine leaning-based Analytics for Automated Rover Systems) is an ongoing JPL effort to bring the latest self-driving technologies to Mars, Moon, and beyond. The ongoing AI revolution here on Earth is finally propagating to the red planet as the High Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) system-on-a-chip (SoC), such as Qualcomm's Snapdragon, become available to rovers. In this three year project, we are developing, implementing, and benchmarking a wide range of autonomy algorithms that would significantly enhance the productivity and safety of planetary rover missions. This paper is to provide the latest snapshot of the project with broad and high-level description of every capability that we are developing, including scientific scene interpretation, vision-based traversability assessment, resource-aware path planning, information-theoretic path planning, on-board strategic path planning, and on-board optimal kinematic settling for accurate collision checking. All of the onboard software capabilities will be integrated into JPL's Athena test rover using ROS (Robot Operating System).