Overview
- In March 2026 a four-foot prototype called ERNEST autonomously drove about 16 miles over 37 hours across seven days in the Colorado Desert with engineers trailing the vehicle for oversight.
- The rover uses an active, clutchable suspension, two front articulation joints and four steerable wheels to change posture, lift individual wheels and adopt new gaits such as squirming, wheel‑walking and obstacle‑climbing.
- JPL trained ERNEST’s autonomy with reinforcement learning in a high‑fidelity simulator that ran thousands of virtual driving hours before transferring the algorithms to the hardware for the field campaign.
- During testing ERNEST reached speeds up to 0.6 mph, roughly ten times the autonomous navigation pace of Curiosity and Perseverance, while operating at dusk, dawn and night to mimic lunar polar shadows.
- JPL is now funding follow‑on work to fuse suspension control with long‑range planning and is evaluating scaling the design into a larger long‑range lunar rover under NASA exploration programs, a change that could let scientists undertake multi‑mile 'road trips' to distant sites.