Autonomous behavior-based micro-rover for lunar exploration

In the millennium, there has been an increased interest in returning to the Moon, and we are conducting the research of micro-rover for lunar exploration that can help to cut down the transportation cost. This paper presents the system-level issues that direct the design in terms of functions, operations and constraints (in term of system resources and environment). At the same time, we argue that although the application-driven experiments engineering has represented some of the best practical results obtained to-date, a sound theory, named Autonomous behavior-based robotics, is needed. It not only should include the robotics or rovers achievements achieved by robotic community from both behavior-based robotics and autonomous hierarchical robotics, but also integrate the achievements of related fields including human movement science, cognitive science, evolutionary computation, and multi-agent systems, etc. Moreover, we analyze the autonomous behavior-based micro-rover system, identify key elements that must be defined in any formal model from system Viewpoint.