FRANK Autonomous flight mark

FRANKAUTONOMOUS

The first autonomous site survey on the Moon. Targeting CLPS delivery in 2029.

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Autonomy layer Lunar sim Research papers All built in-house

What we do

FRANK Autonomous Systems builds the autonomy layer for planetary rovers. Mission 1 puts the first autonomous swarm on the Moon: hazard mapping and site-characterisation surveys first, subsurface mineral prospecting second. Ground-truth data the lunar economy needs.

FRANK

Flexible Recurrent Active-memory Neural Kernel

Brain-inspired decision engine. Full rover autonomy in 20ms on a Raspberry Pi.

SAPPERS

Cheap, redundant rovers. $1M each vs $500M VIPER. Lose one, mission continues.

SUNBEAM

Solar tower base station. Charging, comms, thermal. Enables permanent operations.

Team

Izen Thornton
Izen Thornton
Founder & CEO
Senior Autonomous Systems Test Pilot. CAP UAS Check Pilot Examiner. 400+ hours. Employee #6 at DoorDash Drone Delivery, founding flight test team. Built FRANK from scratch. FEMA/AFRCC certified incident manager.
Hudson Yuen
Hudson Yuen
Founding Engineer
B.S. Aerospace Engineering, UC Davis. Designed fixed-wing VTOL UAV at UC Davis CHPS Lab (UAV swarms for disaster response). Flight Test Operator at DoorDash + Zipline. Authors flight test cards & V&V procedures for UAS certification. FAA Part 107.
Brandon LiWang
Brandon LiWang
Research Associate
Hardware Engineer, Sentradel. UC Berkeley Mechanical Engineering. IEEE-published on autonomous gas source detection. UC Merced MESA Lab: UGV sim-to-real.
Aaron Shey
Aaron Shey
Research Associate
UC Berkeley Cognitive Science. Research apprentice at Berkeley's DNA Sequencing Facility (URAP): Linux administration and Python pipelines on Savio, Berkeley's supercomputer. Bioinformatics and HPC.
Maggie Johnson
Maggie Johnson
Contract R&D Engineer
USAF veteran. Honors Mechanical Engineering, Barrett Honors College at ASU. Space optics intern, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. SolidWorks and MATLAB.
Scott Nisbet
Scott Nisbet
Founding Advisor
Co-Founder: Berkeley 100 Foundation, ArionBio. UC Berkeley alum. Mentor at SkyDeck, Deep Tech Innovation Lab, and Neurotech Collider Lab. Speaker, mentor, and coach for UC Berkeley SCET BMoE Bootcamp.

Get in touch

The lunar surface is our proving ground.
We're not building a rover company. We're building the autonomy layer for the planetary economy.
hello@frankautonomous.com →