Moon exploration has only started within the last few decades, and the interest is continuing to grow. Space Agencies and Private investors are looking at the opportunities that it brings and sees more commercial interest in it. According to a Euroconsult study, 51 missions to the Moon are planned in 2020-2029, compared to 7 in the previous decade, allowing us to better explore Earth's natural satellite and prepare for long-term Moon exploration and, in the future, deep space. The lunar exploration market (both governmental and commercial entities) by 2029 will be worth around $2.7 billion, 40% of all space projects will be Lunar among them 18% will be commercial. Lunar landers and rovers’ development will have a key place in exploration activities. Their main mission would be to collect, aggregate, and process increasing amounts of complex data: vision data, through radar, lidar, scientific payload data to telemetry data. The distance to the Moon significantly impedes the transmission of data to the Earth's surface, forcing it to move at least part of data processing to its surface. Cognition as a rover-lander distributed system allows to approach this problem, having an on-board computer and data processing unit mounted on the rover, responsible for queuing and processing the first and less complex operations. Lander’s powerful data processing unit built of redundant DPUs with higher computing power will be responsible for complex data processing and storage. The reason behind Cognition is to limit the transfer of data to the Earth's surface, to assure that only valuable data is being sent to the ground and to introduce more autonomy into lunar surface exploration. As part of this study KP Labs, together with Poznan University of Technology will perform a baseline analysis on system feasibility, investigate a new architecture for the future rover and lander on-board data processing, benchmark it with existing solution and explore the applicability of ROS system.
