Tier-Scalable Reconnaissance - Advantages & Implications

Advantages & Implications

Some of the major advantages of tier-scalable reconnaissance architectures include:

1. Overhead navigation, enabling deployment of simple, inexpensive, expendable ground vehicles;
2. Efficient commanding of multiple ground vehicles;
3. Mission safety, reliability, and survivability;
4. Optimized target identification, path planning, and obstacle avoidance; and
5. Real time reconnaissance, allowing identification and characterization of active events.

Also, tier-scalable reconnaissance reduces driving requirements for ground vehicles, since they already are deployed in the vicinity of where they need to be. Therefore, driving is limited to “fine-tuning” the location of the ground-tier vehicles to perform local sampling, as opposed to “long-distance” driving towards the location where they need to be. Hence, inexpensive, expendable miniaturized vehicles with limited driving capabilities can be used.

The ground-tier vehicles have limited onboard computing capabilities, since they off-load data analysis to a primary lander or higher tiers that have higher-grade computing equipment. Conceptually, a primary lander is a higher-grade computing engine that also acts as a communication relay, much like a planetary internet router between the tiers. Thus, the tier-scalable reconnaissance paradigm, by its inherent architecture, is an extended distributed computing topology unto itself.